Can you infer a user's country on Photobucket?

fwor

Does anyone know the meaning of the first five characters of the Photobucket URL (e.g. for mine, the s1298 in http://s1298.photobucket.com/) and whether you can infer anything about the user's location from it?

Reason I ask is that someone is trying to sell me something and I ~think~ they are not where they claim to be (i.e. they are not in the UK).

Strider590

Where are they supposed to be?

You could solve this with a simple question about the area they supposedly live in. "A friend just told there has been some flooding on ????? road, hope this hasn't affected you?"

To be honest though, when it comes to money, if there's a doubt, then you should GTFO of there.

Big_Graeme

No, I am in the UK and have an s59 prefix.
If you don't trust them don't deal with them.

fwor

Big_Graeme wrote: »

If you don't trust them don't deal with them.

I'm trying to figure out if I can trust them. They say they are in the UK. I think they are in Croatia. I would like to see if the link to their Photobucket account gives me any further clues - that's all.

Code

Try uploading some of their photos here, you might get lucky with geolocation not turned off in the exif data
http://regex.info/exif.cgi

paddyrg

Any correlation will be so loose it's unreliable - it's more likely to be based around physical clusters that have their own topology which won't map closely to geography

forgotmyname

Since changing my ISP to Vodafone the online traces put me just south of Bristol, Over 90 miles away.

fwor

Code wrote: »

Try uploading some of their photos here, you might get lucky with geolocation not turned off in the exif data
http://regex.info/exif.cgi

Thanks - just tried that, but it looks as though either it has been deliberately stripped out or Photobucket does not make EXIF data visible externally unless you are the owner of the photo (just tried it on one of mine and there's loads of EXIF data there!).

Agreed about the lack of precision - my guess is that the URL names are linked to server clustering, and that it probably changes regularly as their network develops, so this is probably a dead end for me.

AndyPix

Tell them to send you a picture of todays paper next to the item