Checking
Is this person real?
Four things you can do yourself, in about ten minutes, without accusing anyone of anything. Each one says what it proves and what it does not, because a check you misread is worse than no check at all.
1. The photograph
Save the picture, then upload it to a reverse image search. Use more than one: Google Images, TinEye and Yandex each index different parts of the web, and Yandex is noticeably better at faces than the other two.
A hit ends it
The photo belongs to a model, an actor, a soldier or a fitness account under another name. That is conclusive and you can stop there.
No hit proves nothing
Stolen photos are often taken from private accounts that search engines never indexed, and faces generated by AI have never existed anywhere. A clean result is not a clearance.
2. The video call
This is the advice most likely to be out of date. For years the answer was “insist on a video call”. Real-time face replacement is now cheap and widely used: in October 2024, Hong Kong police dismantled a 27-person operation running live face-swapped video calls against dating-platform victims. A call that goes well no longer settles the question, and it does something worse — it converts a doubter into a believer.
A call can still be useful if you make it hard rather than passive. These tools track a face; they cope badly with anything that hides it, turns it away, or has to be improvised.
Ask them to pass a hand slowly across their face
Occlusion is the single most reliable test. Most live face swaps smear, flicker or briefly drop the mask when a hand crosses in front.
Ask for a full turn to profile, held for a moment
Face replacement degrades sharply away from a front-on view, which is why the person on a fake call keeps their head still and centred.
Ask them to pick up something specific in the room
Not a rehearsed prop: a spoon, a book, whatever you name in the moment. Reaching out of frame and returning breaks a lot of setups.
Watch the lips against the sound, and the blinking
A small persistent lag, or blinking that is too regular or too rare, are the residue these systems leave behind.
Notice the excuses before the call
Broken camera, bad connection, hospital rules, military rules, "my phone is too old". One is bad luck. A pattern of them across weeks is the finding.
3. The story
Operators work from a script and often hand a conversation between shifts, so the weak point is not the story itself but its edges. Ask about small, unglamorous, checkable specifics — the ones a script never bothers to invent.
- “What time is it where you are, right now?”
- “What is the weather doing outside your window?”
- “Which airport would you fly out of?”
- “What did you have for lunch, and where from?”
- “Say the name of your street — I want to look at it on a map.”
What you are watching for is not a wrong answer. It is deflection: a joke, a sudden emergency, hurt feelings that you would ask. Someone real answers a dull question dully.
4. The account
A real life leaves a mess behind it. A manufactured one is tidy, recent and strangely popular. Look at when the account was created, whether photographs exist from before this year, whether anyone in them is tagged and posts back, and whether the comments are from people with histories of their own.
If you remember one line, this one
Do not send money to someone you have not met in person.
Every check on this page can be beaten by someone patient and well equipped. That rule cannot, because it does not depend on detecting anything. It is also the reason the whole approach is built to feel like a relationship: a rule that simple only breaks when it stops feeling like it applies to this person.
Send this to someone
Most of these are caught by somebody standing nearby rather than by the person themselves. Passing this on is the single most useful thing you can do with it.
https://heart-osint.org/verify