By skyforbes 
Sometimes the best cyber tools are free — curiosity, Google, and ChatGPT.
It started with a message from my cousin in the province — the kind you can feel vibrating with excitement even before you open it.
A foreigner. Kind, attentive, charming.
“We really clicked,” she said. And the clincher: “He’s already flying here to meet me!”
Attached were photos: a smiling, handsome man and — allegedly — his boarding pass and flight ticket.
That’s when my stomach tightened. The story was too fast, too neat, too perfect.
Hope makes people vulnerable. Scammers know that.
So I did what any OSINT-minded relative would do: I put on my investigator’s hat.
With nothing but Google, ChatGPT, and a reverse image search, I started checking the story.