Customer support and tech support staff

Hijacking a moment of need

Support impersonation targets people who are already frustrated and actively seeking help — the worst possible moment for careful verification. Scammers monitor public complaint posts and respond within minutes with a real employee's photo and a lookalike handle.

Remote access

The endgame is usually remote-access software. Once installed, the "agent" displays a fake refund overpayment and asks the victim to return the difference, or simply opens the banking app while the victim watches a screen that is no longer showing reality.

The staff whose faces are used

Support employees, often junior, find their photos on scam accounts and receive abuse from people who lost money to someone wearing their face. Companies respond with verified-handle lists, which helps only the customers who check.

If these photos are yours

You are the second victim of this scam. The money goes to strangers, but the face, the name and the reputation are yours — and the angry messages from defrauded people land in your inbox, not the scammer's.

• Save everything: profile URLs, screenshots with visible usernames, message threads, and the dates you found them.
• Report the fake profile on the platform itself under impersonation, not spam. Impersonation reports are actioned faster and you can usually attach a photo ID.
• File a report with your national fraud body (IC3 in the US, Action Fraud in the UK, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, or your local police cyber unit).
• Submit the scammer's contact details — the email, phone, wallet or profile handle, never your own — to our database so the next person who searches that identifier finds a warning instead of a fake romance.
• If someone contacts you believing they were talking to you, be kind and clear: send them to a search page so they can verify the details for themselves.

If you were talking to one of these profiles

Slow down before you send anything. Ask for a live video call on a platform the other person did not choose. Ask for a photo holding a handwritten note with today's date and an unusual word you pick. Run the phone number, email, username or wallet address through our database. A genuine person will pass all three in minutes; a stolen-photo persona will produce excuses — bad signal, hospital shift, offshore rig, army firewall, "you don't trust me".

Never send money, gift cards, crypto or copies of your own ID to someone you have not met in person, no matter how complete the story sounds.