With Valentine’s Day quickly approaching, and February being the month of love, we want to give you, our online dating friends, some tips on how TinEye can help you verify dating profiles.
As dating sites have become popular, unfortunately, so has dating fraud. American victims of online romance scams lost more than $87 million in 2014, and in a 2017 Consumer Reports survey, 12% of survey participants said they were scammed. It’s important to make sure you can establish confidence in who you’re talking with: especially when you can do this before the conversation even begins!
One of the best ways you can start to verify a dating profile is by verifying their images with TinEye. TinEye crawls the web for images and uses image recognition to search an image for matches on the internet.
If TinEye finds a match for their profile photo, the results, which point to other sites on the internet that have the image, can tell you more. If that image has been widely used, or worse, found on anti-scammer database websites, you may be dealing with a scammer.
You can search their image on TinEye with the following methods:
- Using the image URL
- Uploading the image from your device
- Using our browser extension
Using the image URL
You can get their image URL in any browser by right-clicking their image and copying the image URL. This is also sometimes called the “image address.”
Then simply visit TinEye.com and paste the image URL to see where else on the web that image has been.
Uploading the image from your device
If you have the image on your computer or mobile device, you can also upload it for searching. When you visit TinEye.com, simply click the upload button (the button that looks like an arrow in a circle) to search the image on TinEye.
Using our browser extension to right-click search
You can make this even simpler with our browser extensions. We provide extensions for Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Opera web browsers. Once installed, you can right-click any image and easily search it on TinEye for verification.
Other resources
In addition, TinEye isn’t the only place to check: you may also want to double-check Google Image Search as well to make sure that the images they’re using are unique to them.
If you have other information, like a name or email address, you may also want to try visiting RomanceScam, one of the largest anti-scammer websites. They have over 100,000 known scammer names, emails, images, and more.
Their search page, located here, lets you see if anyone has spoken about a specific person on their forums. You can search by anything you’ve been given: their name, email address, street address, phone number, or specific phrases from their messages.
We hope this is helpful for anyone looking to keep themselves safe online. Be careful, and as always, happy searching!
