How to Find Out if Someone is Using Your Name or Image on the Internet: Best Tools and Techniques

If you are worried that your identity is misused on social media websites, you have landed in the right place. The cases of catfish have increased over the past few years, and it has created a lot of trouble for people with goodwill. Regular users on social media have faced the problem of identity theft. Still, celebrities and business pages have also faced trouble because of spammers using their names and profile images. 

Today, if you want to find out if someone is stealing and using your name or image on social media or any other place on the web, you can easily get help from digital technology and modern tools.

Best way to find out who is using your name or image on the Internet?

The Internet is an extremely large platform. To catch the culprit who is misusing your name and images, you need the most powerful tools. There are hundreds of tools that can help you search by images, but not all of them are reliable. This is why we have listed the most powerful reverse image search tools here in this section. But before we list out the tools, we would like you to know what search by image is.

Search by image technique - Key to finding fake profile images!

The search-by-image technique, also known as reverse image search, is the featured search method that can help you get results based on image input. The simple definition of reverse image search is to search by image instead of text/keywords. The image search technique and tools have plenty of applications in the digital world. Still, one of the popular ones is to find copied images and identity theft.

Below we have listed the most helpful tool that can search by images with complete accuracy.

• Search by Image – SearchEngineReports.net

Searchenginereports.net is a very powerful website that offers plenty of free tools. The reverse image search tool is one of the premium options that you can get on this site. If you want to catch the person using your images, you can get help from this reverse image tool. The tool is very easy to use, and you can utilize it like a pro even if it’s your first time with it. You just have to enter your images or your profile name in the input sections of the tool and press the ‘search’ button. In a matter of seconds, you would get relevant results from five different search engines. You can easily find the culprit by going through these results.

• Google Images

Sometimes the reverse image search tools cannot do the job properly because of their limited database. This is why you might have to take help from the King of search engines. Google is one of the most popular search engines across the globe with the widest database. Different social media platforms have integrations with Google and so if someone is stealing your images from websites or from your social media account then you can easily find them with Google. You have to open the Google Image extension on your browser and enter the image which you feel is being misused. Google would match the image input with its database and would get you similar and relevant image content.

Other unpopular ways to catch fake profiles!

You can also try these:

Go for Advance manual searching

It is true that with reverse image search tools you can find image plagiarism but you must know that these tools or search engines are only capable of presenting you with results that are 100% similar. Today spammers are using images after editing and alterations. These kinds of edited images cannot be detected by reverse engineering tools. Now to make sure that you catch the person you have to create different variations of the image you have and reverse-search them again. You can try cropping the image, adding common effects and saving them in another format. This can increase your chances of finding fake profiles.

Search by your own name on social media

Another prominent way of finding whether your images or user name is being copied is by searching your profile name on the search bar of the social media account. You would find the search bar on all SM platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. When you search by your name, you will get results of all the people and accounts which are indexed under your user name. You can manually scroll down the results and check whether someone is faking your name, images, and profile. 

Ask your friends and family members

The main purpose behind the creation of a fake profile is to spam the common friends/followers of the account holder. So if you want to find out whether someone is stealing your identity then you can ask your friends and family whether they have been approached by an account using your images and profile name. Today connecting with your social friends and followers has become very easy. You just have to add a story to your account and wait for the people to respond. Or you can also use a people search engine.

This is how easy it is to catch a person who is using your images or name. You can easily report fake profiles and can call them out to them on your account once you get enough evidence against them.