What to do if your photo is being ‘catfished’

INDIANAPOLIS — Recently, we reported on the Top 100 Catfish Photos for 2025.

Not long after the story aired, we heard from a man who said his profile picture was one of the 100 on the list. He wanted to know if there is anything he can do to stop scammers from using his image.  

Scott Shackelford, from Indiana University’s Cyber Security program, said most people don’t realize how widespread photo misuse is on the internet. Innocent people often find their own picture being used in romance scams or ad campaigns they had no idea about.

“It includes even parents who may have their kids showing up in different marketing campaigns halfway across the country because they forgot to tick a box a some point about their images being reused in campaigns,” Shackelford said.

If you discover your photo is being used by someone else on Facebook, Instagram, Tinder or any other platform or website, Shackelford said your first step is to contact the company’s administrators.

“If you report the impersonation, and usually that’s under profile settings, that can at least alert the company to the problem,” he explained. “And they should take some proactive steps to take it down.”

If you want to know where your photo is being used across the internet, you can run a Google reverse image search.

“You can upload the photo, or you can just upload even the URL of where it appears,” Shackelford said. “And then from there you can see here’s all the different places across the internet where it’s popping up.”

With the image search, you can also set up ongoing alerts to let you know if your picture shows up somewhere.

“That automates the process and you can just get the results every week, every month as you would prefer,” Shackelford continued. “And that’s a useful way that you can kind of do it once and forget.”

If you run into resistance, Shackelford said you can contact the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, and even work with an attorney to file a cease-and-desist letter.

“None of that’s perfect, it’s time consuming, but those are a few steps that will help,” Shackelford said.

Shackelford added this is a reminder to always check the settings for privacy and sharing on any platform you use in order to make sure you’re not unknowingly giving them permission to use or share your image.