How to Spot Fake Dating Profiles: A Hawaii Local's Guide
Dating app fraud is a real and growing problem. The FTC reported that romance scams cost Americans over $1 billion in 2023, making it one of the most financially damaging forms of consumer fraud. Here's how to identify fake profiles before they become a problem.
Photo red flags
The most reliable sign of a fake profile is stock-perfect photos with no variety. Real people's photos have different lighting conditions, different settings, different ages across the photo set. Fake profiles often use modeling or stock photos — faces that look unusually perfect from every angle, professional-quality lighting in every single shot, or an absence of candid or group photos entirely. You can reverse image search any profile photo using Google Images or TinEye to see if that photo appears elsewhere online under a different name.
The Hawaii-specific warning signs
Fake profiles targeting Hawaii users often claim to be military (knowing that Hawaii has a large military population) or claim to be offshore on a work contract (oil rig, merchant navy, international business). These setups create a convenient reason why they can never meet in person and why they might eventually need financial help. Any profile claiming to be military that wants to move the conversation off the app quickly and that can never arrange an in-person meeting in Hawaii — where there are multiple active military bases — is almost certainly fake.
Conversation patterns that signal a script
Fake profiles often run scripts — pre-written conversations that can be copied and pasted across hundreds of targets simultaneously. Signs that you're talking to a script: responses that don't quite answer what you actually asked, overly generic compliments that could apply to anyone, an unusually fast emotional escalation (love declarations in the first week), and an eagerness to move you to another platform (WhatsApp, Telegram) before you've ever met. Real people who are interested in you will ask specific follow-up questions based on what you actually said.
What to do if you suspect a fake profile
On Kamaʻāina Date, you can report any profile directly — the report option is visible on every profile card, and our team reviews harassment and impersonation reports within 24 hours. The full process is in our Community Guidelines. For any situation that feels like it may have escalated beyond just a suspicious profile — particularly if money has been requested — the FTC's fraud reporting tool is where to go, and the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) handles romance scam cases specifically.