I've made catfish hunting on Plenty of Fish into an entertaining game. Once you know what to look for, it is pretty easy. The biggest tip-off are well-compose

I've made catfish hunting on Plenty of Fish into an entertaining game. Once you know what to look for, it is pretty easy. The biggest tip-off are well-composed photos. I'll see a profile with those kind of photos and throw them into google image search. I've got about an 80% hit rate there and of those, I'd say 19 out of 20 are fakes (models, photos on multiple profiles in different countries, etc). Another approach is to do a google search on a sentence in the profile's self-description to see if that same sentence has been lifted from somewhere else. What I don't understand is why the dating sites haven't automated the process. They could could do a google image search on every uploaded photo and any hits would be forwarded to a human for investigation. They could also keep an internal blacklist of photos and well-known scammer cut-n-paste self-description text. The fact that they aren't doing that (because it is so easy for me to do it on active profiles) suggests apathy.