Deployed soldiers: the most stolen photos on the internet

Why soldiers' photos are stolen more than anyone else's

A uniform does three jobs for a scammer at once. It supplies instant authority, it explains why the person cannot meet you, and it explains why they cannot video call. That combination is worth more to a fraud operation than any other costume, which is why the same handful of deployment photos circulate for a decade across thousands of fake accounts.

The photos are almost never hacked. They are copied from public unit pages, local newspaper stories about a homecoming, charity fundraisers, and personal accounts that were public for a week. Once a photo set is harvested it is packaged with a name, a rank, a fabricated backstory and a set of ready-made excuses, then sold or shared inside scam compounds as a "kit".

The script attached to the stolen face

The persona is always emotionally isolated and geographically unreachable: recently widowed, one child in boarding school, posted somewhere with no leave and a strict commander. The relationship escalates fast — good morning messages, talk of marriage within two weeks — because the operator is running dozens of conversations and needs to know quickly who will pay.

The ask, when it comes, is never framed as a loan for the scammer. It is a fee charged by a third party: a leave-approval office, a diplomatic courier, a communications allowance, a hospital bill for the child. No real armed force charges any of these.

What real servicemembers face

The people in these photos find out when strangers start messaging them about money they never asked for. Some receive hundreds of messages a year. Careers have been disrupted, marriages strained, and in several publicly reported cases people have travelled to a stranger's home believing they were engaged to them.

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.