Am I Being Catfished?: How to Find Out if You’re Being Catfished

When it comes to finding out whether or not you’re being catfished, there are a few things you can look out for. The most important thing to understand is catfish scammers are usually professionals. They have honed their skills for scamming over many years, and they have tactics to manipulate you to get you to do what they want. In this article, we will describe exactly how to know if you’re being catfished.

The Fastest Way of Telling Whether or Not You’re Being Catfished

Spotting a catfish with the naked eye can be difficult. That is because they have many tactics to keep you from finding out their true identity. Social Catfish gives you the power to see through all of the noise to get the clarity you are looking for. If you think there’s a chance that you might be a target of a catfishing scam, run a reverse image search on the person’s images to get the answers. Use the reverse search tab in the toolbar below to get answers.

How to Find Out If You’re Being Catfished Free

Finding out if you’re being catfished for free is not the surest way of getting answers. This is because you can never have a definite answer without a reverse image search. A reverse image search will tell you for sure that the person you’re talking to has stolen images. Without this evidence, the person you’re talking to can come up with a story to explain it away. It is important to realize the difference in perspective that a romance scammer (the real name for a catfish scammer) is approaching the situation with. You may believe that you’re talking to the love of your life, but to them, they are a career criminal looking to come up with a story to deceive someone they met on the internet. Because of this, it is notoriously difficult to argue against them. If you accuse them of anything or confront them with any information, it is absolutely nothing for them to come up with a way of explaining it away. Because of this, paying $5.99 for a reverse image search is cheap compared to the time, money, and emotional energy it costs to be confused about a relationship with a deceptive scammer.

Why Can a Reverse Image Search Tell You If You’re Being Catfished?

Scammers steal photos. These scammer photos tend to have patterns. For instance, scammers tend to steal images from influencers in certain professions so they can create convincing stories around them. This is because a catfish’s main weapons are the stories they tell, but locating the original source of the images is the easiest way to spot a catfish. A catfish scammers’ whole purpose of sending every single message is to drive you closer to the end outcome that they are after, getting you to send them money. The stories make it appear as if they are living a wealthy, prosperous life abroad while traveling internationally, and they have temporarily fallen on hard times and need your help to pay some “small” expenses. They then weave these stories together to further deceive and manipulate you until you have nothing left. A reverse image search can show you the person’s real name, and real social media accounts. Finding out the true identity of the person in the photos is the only way to break the romance scammers’ spell. Their grip is so powerful that sometimes, even with the truth being plain as day, people still can’t walk away.

How to End A Catfish Relationship

When ending a relationship with a catfish, you have to be absolute in your decision to walk away. Once the scammer believes that you’re thinking about moving away from the relationship, they pull out all of the manipulation tactics they’ve been storing on you. There are books that catfish scammers have written on how to keep you entangled. One of these tactics is, that they write down everything you tell them about yourself and your life. Once they get the impression that you’re thinking about walking away, their destructive behavior intensifies. They will use the information you told them when you were confiding in them to guilt you into staying. They also make you question your own sanity or moral character through a technique called gas lighting. Their goal is to literally take every penny you have, then get you to take out loans to send them money you don’t even have. Many victims leave before they get to this point, having lost a great amount of money, but others stay until they have nothing left, and then they use them for another purpose that helps them further their goals, usually as a money mule, moving money sent to them by other people they are scamming.

Because of this, there is only one way of ending a relationship with a romance scammer.

• Block them on everything: Blocking your scammer on everything is the most crucial step. This is because if the scammer knows how to contact you, they will often find their way back into your good graces only to keep conning you. You’d be surprised how many people find out that the person is a catfish scammer and still end up sending large amounts of money while knowing that the person is a criminal who isn’t even the person in the pictures they’ve sent. Cutting all ties is the only way of protecting yourself. As long as they can speak to you the scam is still taking place.
• Change bank account info: Depending on how much the scam has progressed at the time you decide to walk away, you should change all of your bank account information. This is because scammers often talk victims into sharing these details, and it is common for catfish scammers to use their target’s accounts for illegal activities.
• Report their social media accounts: It is important to report the social media account’s that the person is using. This is because they will use them to catfish other people just like they catfished you. The reason scammers use messaging apps like Google Hangouts is that they don’t want their accounts to be reported and deleted. Reporting their accounts is one of the only ways you can slow them down from scamming someone else.
• Stay On the lookout: As we mentioned earlier, it is important to take the perspective of a romance scammer in order to understand what their true intentions are. When you believed that they were real, you may have looked at their images and invested a lot of emotion into them. Their images often become significant to the victims of the scam. But for the romance scammer, they are just pictures of some guy or girl they stole off the internet. Because of this, it is nothing for them to steal images from someone else and create another catfish account to retarget you. We see this all the time. A fake Instagram account can be made in under 10 minutes, and it is often used to scam for months or even years.

Other Ways of Telling if You’re Being Catfished

When it comes to telling if you’re being catfished, there are a few tools that can help you. Once you’ve run a reverse image search, if you’re looking for more information, these tools can help.

Catfish Phone Number Search

A phone search is another way to tell if someone is a catfish. A reverse phone search can reveal someone’s true identity. A reverse phone search can reveal the name of the person, their last known address, their hidden social media account, and more. But the reason this search isn’t as effective as a reverse image search is because many scammers use VOIP numbers that conceal their location and personal details.

Reverse Email Search

A reverse email search is another powerful tool that can help you uncover the truth. A reverse email search covers the pieces of information that we’ve covered so far, but it has the potential to even uncover more because of how important an email is. It should be run with one of the other two searches.

Conclusion

When it comes to finding out if you’re talking to a catfish scammer, Social Catfish has created tools in order to help you determine whether or not you are being catfished scammed. Pop culture often makes catfishing seem funny, or even small. But catfishing is a serious issue that can cause psychological distress and financial devastation. Finding out the truth is the only way to protect against these scams is to find out the truth. Use the search bar below to run one of the searches we’ve discussed in this article.