SAMLast spring my friend Rachael matched with a guy named Chris. 34, army surgeon, golden retriever named Max, said he grew up outside Cleveland, went to Ohio State, hated the Yankees, loved Peter Luger steak. His Hinge prompts were actually funny – the one about “dating me is like” had something about finding an extra dumpling in your takeout order. She laughed out loud on the F train.
They talked every single day for nine weeks. Good-morning texts at 7:02 a.m. like clockwork. Voice notes that sounded exactly like a guy from the Midwest who moved to Brooklyn five years ago. He knew the difference between Di Fara and L&B. He sent her a playlist called “Songs for when I finally take you to Roberta’s.” She was already stressed about what shoes to wear when he landed at JFK.
Then one Thursday night he called crying. His mom had a stroke. He was stuck in Dubai waiting for a military flight. His bank account got frozen because of some security thing. He just needed $1,800 to cover the hospital bill until his paycheck cleared. He’d Venmo her double the second he got home.
Rachael makes decent money at her marketing job in Flatiron, but $1,800 is still rent money. She told him she’d think about it. She couldn’t sleep. Something felt wrong, but everything else felt so right.
The Checks She Did First (That Didn’t Work This Time)
Rachael isn’t stupid. She’s the friend who taught all of us how to spot catfish years ago. So she did everything the internet says to do.
First, she saved every photo he sent and ran them through Google reverse image search. Nothing. Then Bing. Nothing. Then Yandex and TinEye. Still nothing. The photos were clean.
She checked the EXIF data on the pictures. No location tags, no timestamps that looked weird.
She Googled his exact prompt answers in quotes. No matches.
She clicked his linked Instagram. 187 posts going back four years, stories every day, tagged locations in Brooklyn, Ohio, and Fort Bragg. Looked 100% real.
She even put the address he gave her (a condo in Long Island City) into Google Street View. Real building. Real buzzers.
She was this close to wiring the money because she felt insane for doubting him.
Method 1: Spokeo – The 95-Cent Miracle That Saved Her
At 2 a.m. she remembered someone in a Reddit thread saying 🕵️ Spokeo was running a 95-cent trial. She figured worst case she loses a dollar.
She typed in the phone number he’d been texting and calling from for two months.
Two minutes later the report loaded.
Phone registered to: Grace O., age 58, Lagos, Nigeria.
Possible relatives: four names she’d never heard.
Previous cities: Accra, Ghana and London (burner phone path).
Then she searched the name “Chris” he gave her.
Real Chris exists. Real Chris is married. Real Chris’s wife posted the exact same dog photos on her public Facebook in 2023. Real Chris lives in San Antonio with three kids and has never been to Dubai.
Rachael sat on her kitchen floor in Williamsburg and cried so hard she threw up. Not because of the money she almost lost. Because for nine weeks she had fallen in love with a ghost.
Method 2: Reverse Image Search – Still the First Thing Most People Should Do
Even though it didn’t work for Rachael, this still catches 80% of fakes.
Here’s exactly how to do it right:
- Save the photo to your phone.
- Go to images.google.com, hit the camera icon, upload.
- If nothing, go to Bing.com/images, same thing.
- Then search.yandex.com/images – Russian search engine catches stolen Eastern-European modeling shots.
- Last, TinEye.com.
Do it with every single photo, even the dog. Scammers steal the whole life. Rachel chose to create a Hinge account, having heard the platform filtered out fake profiles. She intentionally bypassed her first choice, Tinder, due to her fear that its massive popularity was synonymous with rampant Tinder fake profiles.
Method 3: Google the Phone Number Like a Psycho
Copy the full number with the country code. Paste it into Google inside quotes: “+234 906 123 4567” Add the word “scam” or “WhatsApp” or “Hinge” after it.
Half the time it shows up on sites like 800notes.com or whocallsme.com with twenty women saying the same sob story.
Sometimes it’s even tied to a completely different Facebook profile with a totally different face.
Method 4: Stalk the Profile Harder Than Your Ex
Method 5: The Red Flags You Can Smell From a Mile Away
These almost never fail:
- Job is military deployed, oil rig, or “crypto investor currently in London/Dubai/Istanbul.”
- Moves to WhatsApp or text within the first week.
- Never available for FaceTime or quick coffee because “deploying tomorrow.”
- Grammar gets worse over time (starts perfect, ends with broken English).
- Calls you babe, baby, queen, my love by week two.
- Has a kid “being watched by a nanny overseas.”
- Talks about marriage and kids before you’ve met.
- Sends you poems or long paragraphs copy-pasted from Google.
Method 6: The Nuclear Option When Everything Else Fails
That’s Spokeo (or sometimes BeenVerified or Intelius). Yes, it costs money, but the 95-cent trial is literally cheaper than one subway ride.
It pulls records Google can’t:
- Who actually paid the phone bill
- Every address the number has ever been tied to
- Criminal records, marriage records, relatives
- Old social profiles under the real name
Rachael swears she’ll pay for Spokeo every month for the rest of her dating life if she has to.
The Rule We All Swear By Now
No money. Ever. Not $50 for a phone bill. Not $200 for a plane ticket. Not $9.99 for a Steam card “so we can play games together.” If someone needs money before you’ve had a drink together in real life, they are a scammer. Full stop.
Where Rachael Is Now
She’s back on Hinge. She still gets butterflies when a cute guy from Park Slope likes her prompt about bagels vs pizza. She still goes on dates. She even met a real finance bro who spells “you’re” wrong and has a real dog and a real apartment in Bushwick.
But the second anyone says “I’m shipping out next week” or “my account is frozen,” she just smiles, runs the number through Spokeo, blocks, and texts the group chat: “Another one for the collection.”
New York dating is already hard enough. Drunk finance guys, ghosting musicians, situationships that last exactly 2.5 months. We don’t need Nigerian romance cartels stealing our money and our hope on top of it.
Do Spokeo first. Save the tears for something that actually matters.
Stay sharp, keep your cash, and the real ones will still be there when the fakes are gone.
– Sam Williamsburg, still single, still never wiring money to Dubai
