How to find a scammer’s identity
You want to know who did this to you. Once the money is gone and the shock fades a little, that question takes over, and it is a fair one. Sometimes it is even answerable. Here is what you can do yourself, and where the search usually has to go from there.
Search the face they showed you
If you have photos of the person, run them through a reverse image search on Google Images or TinEye. Stolen photos are the norm in romance and investment scams. Finding the same face on a stranger’s public profile, or on a scam-report site, tells you the persona was manufactured. That does not name your scammer yet, but it confirms what you are dealing with, and the match itself is evidence worth saving.
Search everything else they gave you
Take each piece of contact information and search it with the word “scam” beside it. The phone number. The email address. The username, the website, the company name they used. Other victims post these details on complaint boards constantly, and a hit means the same operation has been reported before. Keep a note of every place they appear, because investigators use those clusters to tie cases together.
The name they gave you is not the lead
This is the part most guides skip. The name, the accent, the profile, the convincing video calls, all of it was built to survive exactly the searching you are doing now. What actually identifies a scammer is what they cannot fake as cheaply: the account that received your money, the IP addresses behind their messages, the device records held by the platform you met them on. Those records exist. They sit with banks, payment apps, and platforms, and they come out through legal process rather than clever googling.
Save the trail before it disappears
Screenshot their profiles today. Scammers delete accounts the moment a victim goes quiet, and a dead link proves nothing. Save every message, payment confirmation, wallet address, and transaction number. Our guide to preserving evidence in the first 24 hours covers what to grab. A clean evidence file is the difference between “someone scammed me” and a case a platform or a court can act on.
Report it with every identifier attached
File at IC3.gov and ReportFraud.ftc.gov, and include the numbers, emails, usernames, and wallet addresses you collected. You probably will not get a callback about your individual case. That is normal. These systems work on patterns, and your identifiers may be the piece that connects your report to fifty others already on file.
When you need the actual name
If the loss is serious, or you are heading toward a civil claim, identification becomes professional work: preservation letters, subpoenas to platforms, on-chain tracing, attribution analysis. Be careful who you hire for it. Anyone promising to unmask your scammer for an upfront fee, or calling themselves a hacker, is very likely the second scam working off a victim list. Our Investigation Help page covers the smaller cases we take on, and for court-grade attribution we work alongside Rexxfield. Nobody honest guarantees a name. The trail, though, is more recoverable than most victims assume.
One last thing. If you do figure out who they are, or think you have, do not confront them. Hand what you found to law enforcement or your attorney. A scammer who feels exposed deletes evidence, recycles into a new identity, and occasionally retaliates. What you want is accountability, and that runs through the records, the reports, and the people whose job it is to act on them.
— Gus