Published on 2026-07-25
Is that profile photo really them, or is it catfishing?
The photo can be real and the person messaging you still isn't. An Air Force flight chief says his stolen pictures have cost strangers $180,000.
Somewhere out there, a man in uniform has never met you, never messaged you, and has no idea you exist, yet you'd swear he told you he loved you last night. That's the strange mechanics of catfishing: the photo is completely genuine. It really is a person, in a real place, at a real moment in their life. What's fake is everything happening around it.
Honza Cafourek, an Air Force flight chief, told ABC11 that women contact him nearly every week believing they've been talking to him online. He estimates that scammers using his stolen photos and videos have taken roughly $180,000 from strangers who thought they were falling for him. Army recruiter Ceasar Camacho has faced the same thing: people impersonating him tell victims some version of 'I'm in Lebanon, I'm in Syria, and I don't have money to get back to the United States', a story built to justify exactly the request that follows it.
A photo proves a face, not a sender
It helps to separate two questions that feel like one. Is this a real photo of a real person? Almost certainly, yes. Is the person sending it to you the person in the photo? That's a completely different matter, and no amount of staring at the picture answers it. Scammers reuse real videos too, cutting and splicing clips of a service member so it looks like he's mid-conversation, replying to messages he never saw.
This is why a reverse image search matters so much. Uploading a photo to a search engine shows you where else online that exact image has appeared: another dating profile under another name, a public social media account, sometimes a news article. If a face you're falling for turns out to belong to five different profiles with five different names, the picture told you the truth. The person attached to it lied. It takes two minutes, and it works on a photo far better than it works on a feeling.
Cafourek's situation shows just how far this can run. He isn't guessing that his images are being misused; women reach out to tell him so, sometimes asking why 'he' stopped replying, sometimes asking to confirm plans he never made. Volunteer groups have formed specifically to track these fake profiles and warn platforms and victims once a pattern is spotted, because a single stolen identity can be recycled across dozens of accounts at once, each one running the same script on a different stranger.
Who gets targeted, and how
The people running these accounts don't pick victims at random. Christopher Maxwell, a former scammer whose case was reported by KSL, described targeting profiles that showed clear signs of vulnerability, photos of women with children but no partner in the picture, for instance, because loneliness makes the love bombing land faster and the questions arrive slower. Isolation isn't a side effect of these scripts. It's the raw material they're built on.
- Run their profile photos through a reverse image search before you invest real feeling.
- Ask for a short, live video call early and see whether the request gets deflected, delayed, or accepted.
- Notice if their stories about location, work, or deployment keep shifting in small ways.
- Search their name alongside words like 'scam' or 'fake profile' and see what turns up.
- Tell someone outside the relationship what's happening, before urgency talks you out of it.
Testing without accusing
None of this requires a confrontation. You don't have to announce 'I think you're a scammer' to protect yourself, and honestly, that conversation rarely goes anywhere useful. Ask for the video call the way you'd ask anyone you were genuinely interested in: casually, as a normal next step in getting to know someone. A real match will find a way to make five minutes happen. Someone running a script will produce an excuse, then another, then a slightly different one next week, and each new excuse is itself a piece of evidence, even when it sounds perfectly reasonable on its own.
The photo can be entirely real and still tell you nothing true about who's behind the screen.
Real service members like Cafourek and Camacho didn't create these profiles, don't run them, and gain nothing from them; they're victims of the theft too, stuck watching strangers fall for a version of them that was never real. Checking a photo before you trust a story isn't cynicism. It's the one habit that protects both the person being deceived and the person whose face got stolen to do it.