Until recently, the profile photographs used by fraudsters on their fake profiles were almost always stolen from the Internet; usually from online searches for models, porn actors or military personal. There is a lot of information in photographs that can help you ascertain whether the individual is Real or Catfish, i.e. a fraudster.
These stolen photographs are easy to check as you can take a screenshot of them, crop them to remove unnecessary elements and then use a search engine or special website to carry out a ‘reverse image search’ – this is explained fully further below, but it involves uploading the cropped screenshots to a site such as Google Reverse Image Search, Yandex, FaceCheck or PimEyes and those sites will look for matching images on the Internet, revealing where else they are used – where the fraudster stole them from.
In 2019 a website launched called This Person Does Not Exist, it was the first website to use Ai to generate unique photos that looked like a real person. It quickly became popular with scammers as a way to get simple profile photos for their fake accounts. Today Ai has progressed a lot further and now there are quite a few websites which can create detailed, realistic photos and videos of non-existent people and, of course, the fraudsters take advantage of these sites to create the images used on their fake profiles. Crucially, because the photos and videos created with Ai are unique, it renders a reverse image search almost pointless as the images won’t exist elsewhere else – except possibly if another victim of the fraudster has posted the same photos to a dating forum, Reddit, or social media to warn others.
When I carry out my investigations I have a multitude of specialist tools and databases available to me, including what is knows an Open-Source Intelligence Tools (OSINT). One of the free to use tools is called Geospy which uses Ai to tell you where a photograph was taken. It is still a developing technology, but it is usually quite accurate to city or country level.
What clues are in a photograph?
The obvious things to look at are the person themselves. Do their photographs look like they match with what the person has told you and how they describe themselves? Are they quite attractive, successful and wealthy looking? This is usually the first clue with any fraudster profiles.
Think about what else you can see in their photos, what objects are visible and do they match with what you’ve been told, here are some examples to get you under way;
1] What are they wearing? Military uniforms are very often a red flag as they are a favourite of fraudsters, do a Google image search to see if the uniform is that of the military in the country where they claim to live. In general, do any clothes they are wearing in the photos match with their work or lifestyle? Is there any writing on their t-shirt or jacket which might indicate where they work?
2] Look at the type of electrical sockets on the wall. Does the fraudster claim to live in Europe, but the sockets on the wall are north American? You can easily carry out a search for photos of electrical sockets used in each country.
3] Is there a ceiling fan? If the fraudster claims to live somewhere with a colder climate, like the UK, then having a ceiling fan in their living room or bedroom is something you wouldn’t expect to see.
4] Is there a calendar or a poster on the wall, can you see any writing on street signs? Do these items match the language and spellings used by the country where the fraudster claims to be?
5] What else is in view in the photos? Are any buildings in view? Are cars driving on the correct side of the road? This is where Geospy would be very helpful.
6] Are the photos generated by Ai (artificial intelligence)? At the moment Ai is not perfect, sometimes it gets fingers wrong – 6 fingers on one hand or strangely angled fingers is quite common. Hair and skin are not yet perfect, if you look closely at the skin then it often looks like a filter has been applied a bit too strongly and the stray ends of hair don’t quite look right.
Reverse Image Searching
As mentioned above, there are several ways that you can upload a screenshot of the fraudster’s profile photos to see if they have been taken from elsewhere, some methods are free and some are a paid service.
The best way to know for sure is to reverse image search all of the fraudster’s photos, not just a single photo, as often the searches can miss a match. And try to use more than one search engine to do the checks, don’t rely on just one of the search engines. These are the main search engines that I would recommend;
1] Google’s Reverse Image Search: Have you noticed the little camera icon in Google’s search box? Click on that to upload a photo. Google image search is no longer as good as it was, but it is still an important method. In 2022 Google changed their image search to be based on Google Lens which is more orientated towards shopping than reverse image searches. For phone users, the Google app also has Google Lens built in. Once your photo has loaded in to Google it shows you shopping results, but there is a button above your photo saying “Find Image Source”, click on that and see if the photo is found on any websites where it shouldn’t be, and with different names against it. https://www.google.co.uk/imghp click on the camera icon to upload a photo.
2] Yandex – the Russian search engine: Another search engine similar to Google, but Russian and with very different search results https://yandex.com/images/ click on the camera icon to upload a photo.
3] FaceCheck: A paid service but for free you can see the search results, just without the ability to click down and see any additional details, such as the website the image was found on. https://facecheck.id My experience with this one is that you get a lot of unwanted results of similar looking people, these are called ‘False Positives’ and can be misleading
4] PimEyes: Like FaceCheck, this is a paid service and the results can be seen for free without the ability to click and look deeper. It costs £14.99 to unlock the search results if you feel you need to do so. https://pimeyes.com this is my preferred reverse search engine as it is much more accurate than the others.
5] Geolocation with Geospy: I’ve mentioned Geospy already, it is one of the few geolocation search engines available at the moment and I have found it to be very accurate to country-level and quite accurate to nearest-city-level. And it is free to use Geospy
By now you should have enough knowledge to confidently take screenshots of profile photos, crop them to remove the unwanted parts, analyse what you see in them and upload them to search engines to see where else they exist. Remember though, that a genuine person will have their images online too – you will need to look at the results to decide if you’ve found the real person’s social media accounts or the fraudster’s.
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