Almost everybody expects to be lied to online. Pew Research Center found that 71% of online daters think it is very common for people to misrepresent themselves to seem more desirable, and 96% think it is at least somewhat common. So the useful question is not whether someone might be exaggerating. It is which lies matter, and which checks you can do in ten minutes that would catch them. Three different problems wearing the same word "Is this person real" gets used for three situations that need completely different responses. Separating them saves a lot of wasted worry. Someone who does not exist. The photographs belong to a stranger, the name is invented, and there is a person behind it running the same conversation with forty others. This is the one people mean when they say catfishing, and it usually ends in a request for money. Someone who exists but is presenting an old version of themselves. The photograph is genuinely them, from 2011. The height is aspirational. The job title has been rounded up. This is ordinary human vanity and it is probably the most familiar of the three. Someone who exists and is hiding something material. Married. In a relationship. Looking for something quite different from what they have said. This is the category that does real damage, and it is the hardest to detect, because everything checkable checks out. Most safety advice is written for the first problem. The third gets less attention and deserves more. The ten minute check Reverse image search, first Save their main photograph and upload it to an image search. If the same face appears attached to a different name on another site, you have your answer in under a minute. This catches stolen photographs, which is the cheapest version of the fraud. It will not catch a real person using their own old picture, and it will not catch someone who generated an image rather than stealing one. Check whether the story has any edges A person who has lived fifty or sixty years has accumulated specific, verifiable, slightly boring details. They worked somewhere with a name. They went to a school. They have a town they grew up in and an opinion about how it has changed. An invented person tends to have a profession rather than a job, a city rather than a neighbourhood, and a biography that stays at a comfortable altitude. Ask about the specific. Not as an interrogation, just as normal conversation. "Which hospital?" is an entirely ordinary question, and it is worth noticing when it does not get a straight answer. Ask for a live call, unscheduled This is often the most revealing check. Not a planned video call at eight on Thursday, which is arrangeable. A spontaneous "are you free for five minutes?" Someone real will sometimes say no, because people are busy. They will offer another time and then keep it. What tells you something is a pattern of reasons, rather than any single excuse. Look at how the photographs relate to each other Genuine photograph collections are inconsistent in believable ways. Different years, different lighting, other people in the frame, bad haircuts. A set of images that are all flattering, all solo, and all roughly the same quality is worth a second look. Notice where the conversation wants to go Two early pushes matter. A push to move onto a private messaging service, and a push toward emotional intensity faster than the relationship has earned. Neither is proof of anything on its own. Plenty of honest people prefer their own messaging app. Combined with anything else on this page, the picture gets clearer. What verification actually proves, and what it does not Platforms advertise verification heavily and rarely explain what it means. Here is what it means on DateSteady, stated precisely. A verified badge means a submitted selfie was consistent with at least one photograph already on the member's profile. It is one of several checks that build a member's Trust Score, alongside email, phone, age and an optional location confirmation. It does not tell you when those photographs were taken. It does not tell you their legal name, or that their stated age is accurate, or whether they are married. We do not run criminal background checks. It cannot tell you whether they mean what they are saying to you. That is a narrower claim than most platforms make, and it is narrow on purpose. It addresses one specific problem, which is talking at length to someone who turns out to look nothing like their pictures. A few other things do real work alongside it. Members must verify a phone number before they can send messages, apart from a small number of internal accounts used to operate the service, which makes disposable accounts more expensive to produce. Profile and gallery photos are screened before they appear. Members can optionally confirm they are near the city shown on their profile and earn a location badge. Voice greetings and video introductions are free, so hearing someone does not require arranging anything. None of that removes dishonesty. Anyone who promises you a platform with no dishonest people on it is describing something that has never existed in any place where humans gather. Is it illegal in Canada? This comes up constantly and the answer is unsatisfying but worth knowing. What follows is general information, not legal advice. There is no Canadian offence called catfishing. Pretending to be someone else online is not, by itself, a crime. What makes it criminal is what it is used for. Obtaining money or property by deceit is fraud under section 380 of the Criminal Code. Section 402.2 covers obtaining or trafficking in another person's identity information for use in certain offences, and section 403 covers fraudulently personating another person for specified purposes such as gain or disadvantage. Section 162.1 makes it an offence to knowingly publish, distribute, transmit, sell, make available or advertise an intimate image without consent, so the distribution is the offence rather than the threat of it, although a threat may engage the separate extortion and uttering-threats provisions. Criminal harassment under section 264 requires more than persistence: the accused must know the person is harassed or be reckless as to whether they are, and the person's fear for their safety must be reasonable in the circumstances. So a person who invents a persona and takes $40,000 from you has committed fraud, and the invented identity is evidence of it. A person who invents a persona and wastes six months of your life has done something cruel that the criminal law does not generally reach. If you are in this situation, report it to the platform, to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre at 1-888-495-8501, and to your local police. The harder question Everything above deals with the first two problems. The third one, the person who is genuinely who they say they are and is lying about what they want, is not solved by verification technology. No photograph check detects a man who has not mentioned his wife. What works there is slower and less satisfying. Time, mostly. Meeting people they know. Noticing whether the shape of their availability makes sense. Paying attention when something does not add up, rather than explaining it away because you like them. That last part is difficult for anyone. Wanting something to be true makes contrary evidence easier to set aside, and that is a human trait rather than a character flaw. It is also the reason the checks above are worth doing early, while you are still able to look at the answers plainly. Sources: Pew Research Center, "The Virtues and Downsides of Online Dating", February 2020. Criminal Code of Canada, sections 380, 402.2, 403, 162.1 and 264. Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre. This article is general information and not legal advice.