Bayou Renaissance Man informs us of an insurance fraud where the serial number is taken from a posted photo of a firearm and claimed to be stolen.
The posted pic has an upload date and many of them have metadata which show when the photo was taken. The original file definitely does. These will predate the fraudulent insurance claim.
If you're still in possession of the firearm in question then it's pretty darned obvious you didn't sell it to the criminal in question.
A pain in the ass when it comes up, but straightforward.
The thing is, you don't even need a photo of a gun to make this claim.
Search for the model you want to make a fraudulent claim of with the search term "manufacture date" and you will be rewarded with many partial serial numbers with the last two or three numbers replaced with x's.
Fill in the x's with numbers and pepper your angus for your trial date when you get busted.
The second half of his post is a warning that Google and Facebook are cataloging your gun by serial number and that can be searched for...
Obscuring the serial number isn't really going to save you from them. Especially since they only care if you have a gun, not if you have particular example of that gun.
I admit I've posted a lot of gun pics with little worry about the serial being visible. It seems that Google and Facebook missed me in their catalog because the only serial that comes up is my M16A2 clone I made from an 80% lower and had engraved with a Brony Colt logo, and it's by no means the first hit.
I think this isn't as big a deal as the TFB article makes it out to be.
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I think this whole thing is more theory than practice. I still generally wouldn't post pictures anymore and if I did would probably obscure the SN. But I've been accused of being paranoid and don't necessarily deny it all that much.
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