I was sent an email to my old romancescambaiter.com address today asking for help in proving someone's a scammer. That in itself was a surprise as I haven't updated it in years. Anyway, they asked for help in proving someone's a scammer. I don't have much information at the moment, but one of the things they did send was a passport and that in itself was proof enough it's a scammer. I figured it'd be worth talking you through the methods used in proving it's being used by a scam. Let's start with the fake passport itself.
What we have here is someone claiming to be Florian Defferrard. Let's zoom in on the photo to see what that tells us.
The first thing I always check is the watermark, and on this one you can immediately see a problem. There are two very distinctive and very different patterns there. Notice how the headshot has a very tightly spaced watermark while the rest of the image has a much wider and more random one. That tells us something has been placed over the top of the original image. I say "original", but the odds here are it's an already altered one looking at the pattern. Now look at the bottom of the photo and see hopw it's faded out. No genuine passport photo would look like this. It's 100% a fake without even needing to look at the rest of it, and frankly I could see that from the original image without even having to zoom in.
So we know it's a fake, we know it's a stolen image, but who's the real person in the image. Here's where I use the zoomed in photo and run a reverse image search on it. I use a browser addon to do multiple searches at once, and get a hit.
Sweet, now we have a name to go with the face, but are we sure it's not just another scammer using the same image with a different name? Let's do a bit more digging so we do our due dilligence. The easiest way is to do a search of the name and see what pops up.
Not only do we find a whole bunch of proof we've found the real person, but we also have a video of him in action. Now we're sure we've found the real person, and that gives us proof the scammer is abusing stolen photos of someone else. It's not difficult when you know how, is it?