Police officers and federal agents

Fear instead of affection

Law-enforcement impersonation skips courtship entirely. It uses the stolen photo as a credential in a pressure call: there is a warrant, an account linked to trafficking, a tax debt, an unpaid fine. The victim is kept on the phone, isolated from anyone who would say "call them back", and steered to an irreversible payment method.

The recovery-scam variant

A crueller version targets people who have already been defrauded. An "investigator" contacts the victim with a stolen officer photo, says the stolen funds have been traced and frozen, and asks for a release or legal fee. Victim lists circulate between fraud groups, so a first loss is frequently followed by this second attempt.

Officers carry the complaint

The officers in these photos receive furious calls from people who believe they were extorted by a named individual. Departments have had to issue public notices confirming that their staff photographs were stolen — a distraction that the fraud operation costs them for free.

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.