September 14, 2026

How to Check a Dating Profile Photo for Signs of a Scam

Someone friendly has been messaging you. They remember what you told them last week. Their profile photo looks genuine, but you do not know whether it belongs to them.

Scammers use stolen photographs and generated ones.

Reverse-search the picture

This is the most useful thing you can do.

On a computer, the quickest way is to right-click the photo in Chrome and choose "Search image with Google."

On a phone or tablet using Chrome with Google as the default search engine, press and hold the photo and choose the Google image-search option.

If someone sent the picture inside a dating app or a messaging app, save it to your device first. Then open images.google.com and click the small square icon at the right-hand end of the search box. It is called Google Lens, and it lets you upload the picture from your device.

If that face appears on a modeling site, a business in another state, or several profiles under different names, you have learned something useful. If nothing comes back, you have learned very little. Many genuine photos are not indexed anywhere, and a generated image may also have been posted online and produce a match.

Treat visual clues as questions, not answers

Counting fingers and looking for distorted backgrounds cannot reliably tell you whether a photo is genuine.

Some details are still worth a look. Glasses frames that do not line up across the face. Earrings that do not match. A necklace that disappears behind hair and comes back in the wrong place. Background text that is almost letters.

None of these proves anything. Real photographs contain odd details, and convincing fakes contain none of them. Use them to raise a question, not to settle one.

Video calls are worth asking for, mostly because many criminals will refuse or keep making excuses. Live video can be manipulated, so a call that goes ahead is encouraging rather than conclusive.

The request matters more than the picture

You can stay uncertain about a photograph indefinitely. You can be much more certain about what someone is asking you for.

Watch for strong feeling very early, constant messaging, a reason they can never meet in person, and a move from the app where you met to private messaging.

Then comes money, in one of several forms. An emergency such as a medical bill, a customs charge, or a frozen account. A request to buy gift cards. Or an investment opportunity, often in cryptocurrency, on a platform they recommend and help you set up. That last one catches people who are confident they would never fall for a sob story, because it arrives as good news rather than a crisis.

If you have not met someone in person, do not send them money and do not invest on their advice. That holds however genuine the photograph looks.

What was reported last year

In 2025 the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded about $929 million in reported losses in its confidence and romance category.

The FBI also counted AI for the first time. Across every kind of fraud, not romance alone, 22,364 complaints mentioned AI and accounted for about $893 million, of which about $352 million was reported by people aged 60 and older. Only 626 of those complaints were romance scams, worth about $19 million. That is not because AI is rare in romance fraud. It is because a convincing fake is the kind of thing you do not notice, and cannot report.

Most of these begin on social media rather than a dating app.

These figures count only people who filed a report. Reporting a scam involving someone you trusted is hard, and many people never do.

If this is happening to you now

Stop sending money, and cancel any payments still scheduled.

Save the conversation, the profile, and the payment details before anything is deleted.

Contact your bank or the payment provider immediately and ask what can be stopped.

Report the profile inside the app, and report the fraud at reportfraud.ftc.gov and ic3.gov.

Being deceived does not make you foolish. Someone worked patiently to earn your trust, and that is what they set out to do.

A second opinion on an image

You can upload a photo to Shieldle's Photo Verify. It gives an AI assessment of whether an image shows signs of being generated or edited, and explains what it noticed. It is part of a subscription, with the first week free.

Two limits worth knowing. It can be wrong, and it cannot tell you who is actually messaging you. A stolen photo may come back as "Likely Real" even though it belongs to someone else entirely.

One thing to understand before you upload anything. The photo is sent to our AI provider to be checked, and on our current plan they may keep it and have staff review it. Shieldle itself never saves your photos. That is why we ask you to send only the picture you are checking, and never your own passport, license, or bank paperwork.

Source: FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2025 Internet Crime Report.