Check Their Personal Information
Depending on how much you have interacted with the potential fraudster, you may have a lot of personal information to check, or you may have just what is shown on their profiles – either way, checking personal information is fairly straightforward. It is crucial that you must show a lot of self control if doing this and be aware that anything other than a quick one-off check could be construed as stalking or harassment on your part or expose that you have been looking – it concerns me that much that I almost didn’t include this article on the website.
There are quite a few different types of information that you can check out, I have listed the more common items below and what you can do to check each one;
Full Name and User ID: Use a couple of different search engines to search their name and user ID, i.e. try Google, Yahoo or Bing, making sure you put their name in quotes so the name is searched for as a phrase, such as “Steve Fraudman” rather than just Steve Fraudman. If a well known fraudster then the name they are using might show up in forum discussions between other victims or in newspaper articles.
Email Address and Phone Number: Perform an online search, Google should be sufficient, of their email address and telephone number if you have them. Make sure to enclose the text in quotes, like this “mrfraudster@mailprovider.com” or “+63 7654 34567”, as enclosing the information in quotes ensures that Google searches for that exact phrase and not just search for parts of it. What you are looking for here is whether either show up on any websites or forums discussing fraud.
Social Media: Try searching various social media platforms for their name. Generally we think of Facebook, Instagram and X (Twitter) but there are plenty of other social media platforms if they live in other countries, such as WeChat, QQ and Weibo in China, VK and OK in Russia, and so forth. If you find a matching social media account then look at their posts to see what they post about, how old is their account? How far back do their posts go? If the account is new or a few months old then it could well be fake too.
LinkedIn: If you have a LinkedIn account then be careful when searching for somebody on LinkedIn or when clicking on search engine results that show LinkedIn because by default LinkedIn will show a person who has recently viewed their profile. To avoid this if you have LinkedIn, go to Settings & Privacy, Visibility and Profile Viewing Options and set profile viewing to Private Mode.
Don’t be a Stalker Yourself: I you are going to do these checks, then check just once and if you find red flags indicating they are a fake then move on and forget about the person. It is very possible that the fraudster has stolen someone’s identity and in your searching you have found the real person who actually has no idea what is going on.
It is important that you don’t contact them, or anyone that knows them, or their employer and don’t keep looking at their information as it could be misconstrued as harassment or stalking. It takes just two unwanted attempts to contact someone, or two repeat behaviours, to be considered stalking or harassment.
Their Work: If the suspected fraudster has told you where they work, then you may find them listed on their employer’s company website of social media sites if genuine. Just look though, do not reach out to the company or try to message anyone to find out as this too could be misconstrued as stalking.
I have reluctantly included this information because it is important for people to know how to protect themselves from potential fraudsters, but I cannot stress enough that you need to be very careful when doing this kind of background checking, or better still, if you have doubts about the person then it is preferable to just block them and forget them.