Scammers can use AI tools to find your location in photos you post to social media, according to researchers at McAfee. This information can then be used in targeted social engineering attacks. The researchers found that free AI models can correctly identify a photo’s location with around 90% accuracy.

“Gemma3 27B correctly identified the city and country of a travel photo 87% of the time,” McAfee says. “Qwen3 VL 30B performed even better, reaching 91% accuracy across the same dataset. That means in roughly 9 out of 10 cases, an AI model that’s available for free, to anyone, could look at an ordinary travel photo and correctly name where it was taken. This kind of analysis is also how AI tools understand images more broadly, shaping not just scams, but how information shows up in AI-powered answers. And when the exact city wasn’t identified, the country alone was almost always correct. For a scammer, that’s more than enough. It’s also enough to turn a vague, generic scam into one that feels specific, timely, and believable.”

People need to be aware of how threat actors can exploit publicly available information, especially now that AI can remove the legwork from the reconnaissance stage of the attack.

“Knowing where someone is or where they’ve recently been is one of the oldest tricks in a scammer’s playbook,” the researchers write. “But until recently, getting that information required either knowing the person or getting lucky. AI removes the guesswork, allowing attackers to build highly specific, contextual scams at scale. With geo-location inference this accurate, scammers no longer need to cast a wide net and hope a generic phishing message lands. Instead, they can use publicly shared photos to build a believable context around an attack.”

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McAfee has the story: https://www.mcafee.com/blogs/mcafee-news/ai-travel-photo-location-scams-geolocation-research/