The Fiji Police Force Cyber Crime Unit is investigating a complaint lodged against the circulation of a fake image of Minister of Women Lynda Tabuya.
Acting Commissioner of Police Juki Fong Chew confirmed to this newspaper that an inquiry has begun.
“Yes, we confirm receiving her report and an investigation has commenced,” said Mr Chew.
He said all investigations of this nature were carried out by the Cyber Crime Unit with the Criminal Investigations Division.
“Any complaint can be lodged at any police station, and it will be referred to the team at CID HQ.
“Our team also works with our bilateral police partners (AFP/NZ Police) who can assist the unit for verification purposes.”
The investigation came on the back of an inquiry by open-source intelligence specialist Eric Nelson, who found that a scandalous image – that appeared on a popular Facebook page run by former FijiFirst government communications adviser – had been used widely on several porn sites dating back to 2014.
The owner of Minnesota-based Slickrockweb Inc first used the TinEye, the original reverse image search engine, which uses image recognition with a growing index of billions of images.
TinEye is also used to find out where an image came from, how it is being used, or if modified versions of the image exist.
He also double checked his findings with Yandex, another search engine.
The search results he forwarded to The Fiji Times this week said over 64.9 billion images were searched and multiple matches were found, most of them on what appeared to be porn sites.
