Victim of photo & identity theft

Government officials and tax agents

Official photos behind refund and penalty scams

impersonation

government

phishing

identity theft

Illustration of how these photos are reused in fake profiles. We never republish a victim's stolen photograph.

Photos and names of tax officers, immigration officials and benefits staff are used in refund scams, deportation threats and fake application-fee demands.

Where the photos come from

Official press photography, departmental websites, public hearings and LinkedIn.

Personas built from them

A tax officer processing a refund that needs your bank details
An immigration official threatening deportation over an unpaid fee
A benefits caseworker requesting documents to release a payment

Where they show up

SMS

Phone

Red flags

A refund that requires you to supply full card or banking credentials
Threats of arrest, deportation or benefit cancellation within hours
Payment demanded in gift cards, crypto or transfers to an individual
Links to domains that imitate the real government address

How to verify

Government departments do not demand immediate payment by phone
Log in to the official portal by typing the address yourself, never via a link
Call the department on the number published on its official site
Report the number, email and link here so others searching find it

Search a name, phone, email or wallet

Fear plus authority

Official impersonation works on urgency. A named officer, an official photo and a deadline measured in hours prevent the one behaviour that defeats the scam: hanging up and calling back on a number the victim looks up.

Refunds and applications

The gentler version offers money — a tax refund, a rebate, a grant — and harvests banking credentials on a cloned portal. Immigration variants target people whose status genuinely depends on fees and deadlines, and who therefore cannot easily dismiss the threat.

Officials named without consent

Real civil servants find their names and photos attached to extortion calls. Departments publish scam-awareness pages because their own staff directories are being used against the public.

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.

Important

This profile describes a pattern of photo and identity theft. It does not accuse any person pictured in such photographs of wrongdoing — they are victims. We do not republish stolen photo albums. If a report on scamers.org names you incorrectly, use our I'm Innocent review process and we will investigate.