It nearly always starts innocently. A match on a dating app, a few good conversations, and soon the other person is sending photos: a coffee on a terrace, the view from their balcony, a walk along a canal. It feels personal and real. Only weeks later, when they ask for money to cover a hospital bill or a stuck bank transfer, do some people start to feel uneasy.
Dating fraud is not a fringe problem in the Netherlands. In October 2025, police in Utrecht arrested two women suspected of using dating apps to take around 550,000 euros from at least 26 people. The Dutch Fraudehelpdesk has warned for years that victims often lose thousands of euros, and that shame stops many of them from reporting it. Doubting early can save a lot of pain. And the photos a scammer sends often reveal more than they realise.
Why photos are a scammer’s weak spot
A fake profile lives or dies by its images. A scammer needs photos of an attractive person, but also of a believable life: a home, a workplace, a city. Those photos are almost never their own. They come from stolen Instagram accounts, stock photo sites or old profiles of real people who have no idea their face is being used.
That creates a gap between the story and the pictures. The match says they live in Amersfoort, but the photo “from my kitchen window” shows a street that does not exist anywhere in the Netherlands. Or the story fits the Netherlands, but the photos were taken in a completely different city from the one they named. Those contradictions are hard to notice when you are falling for someone, but easy to check once you know what to look for.
Step one: reverse image search
The first check is the simplest. Save the profile photo and search with it in Google Lens, Bing Visual Search or TinEye. If the same picture turns up on another account with a different name, or on a stock site, you know enough. A real person on a dating app rarely uses photos that have been floating around the internet for years.
An empty result does not automatically mean the photo is genuine. Scammers increasingly use pictures from private accounts that search engines do not index, or generate faces with AI that exist nowhere else. We covered that last category in our piece on deepfakes and geolocation. That is why it pays to look beyond the face, at the surroundings in the photo.
Step two: does the place match the story?
This is where visual geolocation comes in. GeoPin does not look at who is in a photo, but at where it was taken. The model compares the background against an index of millions of street-level images from across the Netherlands, paying attention to facades, roof shapes, street lights, cycle paths and how buildings sit relative to each other. You get back a predicted location with coordinates and a confidence score.
For dating fraud, this is most useful with the “everyday” photos a match sends to back up their story. Think of a photo of the street outside their home, a selfie at the train station, or a terrace in “their” city. Upload it and compare the result with what they told you in the chat. If GeoPin points to the neighbourhood they mentioned with high confidence, that is reassuring. If it lands on a spot two hundred kilometres away, that is worth asking about.
A low score can tell you something too. GeoPin is built for the Netherlands. If a photo supposedly taken in Zwolle finds no good match anywhere in the Dutch index, there is a fair chance the picture was taken abroad. That is not proof on its own, since dark, blurry or heavily zoomed photos also score low, but it is a reason to look more critically.
An example: Mark from Haarlem
Say Sandra meets Mark on an app. He is an engineer, his profile says he lives in Haarlem, and he is temporarily working on a project abroad. They message every day. Mark sends photos of his flat and a picture captioned “my street, I miss it already”. After three weeks he asks whether Sandra can help with 2,000 euros, because his foreign bank account has been frozen.
Sandra hesitates and first searches for the profile photo. Nothing. Then she uploads the street photo to GeoPin. The prediction does not point to Haarlem at all; it lands with a low score on a random spot, and on closer inspection the terraced houses with their wide roof overhangs and the parked cars with white rather than yellow number plates do not look Dutch. When she asks Mark which street exactly he lives on, he dodges the question. That is exactly the pattern the Fraudehelpdesk warns about.
It works the other way too. A friend of Sandra’s has doubts about her new date, but the photo of his bike shed points neatly to a street in Leiden, just as he said. That does not prove he is a good person, but it does take one worry off the table. In that sense, geolocation is just as much a way to give someone the benefit of the doubt.
Other warning signs
A photo that does not add up rarely stands alone. Scammers tend to follow the same script, and once you know the signs, you spot them sooner. The main ones are:
- They want to move off the dating app quickly, to WhatsApp or Telegram.
- There is always a reason why a video call or meeting in person is not possible.
- The story has a foreign element: an oil rig, a military mission, a project abroad.
- They ask for money, a small amount first and then more and more.
If you recognise one or more of these, take a critical look at the photos you have received. A reverse image search and a geolocation check take a few minutes and can save you a lot of money and heartache.
Respect the other person’s privacy too
One caveat. Geolocation is a powerful tool, and it is meant for checking stories, not for tracking people down. Use it on photos someone sent you themselves, when you have doubts about who you are talking to. Do not go looking for the home address of an honest person you have never met. We wrote earlier about the privacy risks of geotagging, and they apply to you as well: think twice before sharing photos of your own street with someone you do not know yet.
GeoPin does not recognise faces and is not built to. The model only looks at the surroundings, and uploaded photos are processed in line with the GDPR.
What to do if you suspect fraud
If you have doubts about a match, do not transfer money, even if they push or get emotional. Keep the chats and photos, report the profile to the dating app and contact the Fraudehelpdesk. If you have already lost money, report it to the police and call your bank straight away. The faster you act, the better the chance a payment can still be stopped.
Check a photo with GeoPin
Got a photo and want to know whether it was really taken where they say? Upload it to GeoPin and see within seconds where the model thinks it came from. Curious what happens behind the scenes first? Read how GeoPin works.