Process Server and Investigation
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Process Server and Investigation
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Catfishing is when someone uses photos, personals, social media profiles, and other fake/incorrect/misleading information to deceive and cause harm to their victims. Scammers, murderers, rapists, bullies, and so many others will use catfishing to achieve their evil ends. When they strike vulnerable victims, many of them turn to us for assistance to help them expose their predator and receive justice.
There are many distinct types of evil people out there who will use catfishing to lure and entrap their innocent victims. The types of deviant predators who engage in this illegal and immoral behavior include, but are by no means limited to, the following:
People seeking to rape, sexually assault, or otherwise sexually exploit their victims will often use catfishing to lure their intended targets. They may be child predators who are adults pretending to be children, only to kidnap them and rape them later. Our social media private investigators at our private investigation agency note that these evil individuals will use any method they can or even a combination thereof to rape, kill, defraud, harass, or otherwise harm their victims.
There are also countless stories out there of classmates, coworkers, and even just random people out there who will use catfishing to bully and harass others. They may have vendettas, carry old grudges, and sometimes just randomly pick people they view as vulnerable and easy targets to bully. These predators may pretend to be a fellow classmate or neighbor that their target has a crush on, or they may post comments online under fake profiles to demean, threaten, and harass their victims.
Our catfishing private detectives note that serial killers and other murderers sometimes use catfishing as a method of luring their intended victims into a sense of safety and security before they murder them. They try to build trust and even a friendship or romantic relationship with their intended murder victims, to get them to meet with them or otherwise put themselves in a compromising situation where killing them and hopefully getting away with it becomes much easier.
Some people who are exploring their gender and/or sexuality will catfish others and roleplay their new sexuality and/or gender identity before they officially “come out” to others. This play, while harmful to their victims, allows the person doing the catfishing to explore the repressed/hidden gender and/or sexuality freely and safely they harbor within their own hearts and minds. Even the least harmful of these types of predators do not leave most of their victims completely unscathed.
Our digital private investigators that conduct digital private investigations note that these types of individuals do not normally seek money, property, and do not desire to harass their victims. Of course, by lying to their victims they can and often do indeed cause pain, suffering, and violate their trust. Thus, it is better for people seeking to explore their gender and/or sexuality to do so in ways, forums, chat groups, etc., where they can maintain anonymity yet not lie to and deceive others.
Romance scammers are some of the more common forms of crimes where the romance scammers use catfishing to harm their victims. These individuals may pretend to be physicians, attorneys, high ranking generals, movie stars, and others that their victims find themselves flattered to have met. These scammers pick more vulnerable individuals to “befriend” and start “relationships” with, building up the trust and relationship in what criminologists refer to as “fattening the pig.”
Once they have fattened the pig – their victim – enough with trust and relationship building, these predators will seek to cash in on their investment of time and energy. These romance scammers will then begin to have one disaster after another come up where they need money from their victims to help them out. These predators promise to repay them, but of course they never do.
Once their victims can no longer give them more money, they often become rude and hateful and break off the “relationship.” They may also continue pressing for more money, just in case their victims still have some that they have yet to disclose. Indeed, even when our predator private investigator at our PI agency shows them the hard evidence that the person scammed them, some of the victims still feel so attached to their investment of time, money, energy, and the emotional high they got from the “relationship” that it takes them time to finally accept it.
To achieve these evil ends, these romance scammers will employ some or all the following in this non-exhaustive list of catfishing tactics:
Our social media private detectives often find that romance scammers and other predators who use catfishing will use face swapping as a method of tricking their intended victims. Scammers take the face from the photo of one person and put it on the body of another. They do this so if they try to verify the photo with a reverse image search like TinEye, it will not show the other places on the Internet where social media cat fishers have also used these same photos for other scams.
These reverse image searches can help show people if someone or indeed many people have posted a particular photo elsewhere on the Internet. If the victim sees the photo of their “loved one” all over different porn and scammer-beware websites, they will know the person they are talking with is a romance scammer. With face swapping, a scammer can make a photo they found online look original.
Face swapping, while utilized more pre-artificial intelligence, is also still popular because even though romance scammers can now make some impressive, beautiful photos of people via artificial intelligence, there are a plethora of free apps which make detecting videos and photos people have made with AI as simple as an upload and click.
Artificial intelligence continues to become increasingly popular as a method of creating fake videos and photos. Catfishing private investigators still see romance scammers use AI quite often, yet our artificial intelligence private detective can use any of the free or paid apps online to determine if their client’s “romantic partner” is fake or real. Thus, while popular in the scamming industry, smart, experienced romance scammers do not use AI-generated photos and videos as part of their catfishing schemes.
Many catfishing private investigators also catch scammers using fake social media profiles they have created. These are often newly created, but more experienced fraudsters will keep and carefully cultivate some for much longer periods of time that add credibility to their schemes.
Romance scam private investigations turn up some extremely well-made, authentic-looking legal documents. These fraudsters will do anything and everything to manipulate their victims into handing over their hard-earned money. When the scammers are more experienced, they will often create some very authentic-looking legal documents that will fool plenty of people.
Artificial intelligence has made it easier than ever to forge legal documents like passports, birth certificates, drivers’ licenses, etc. Even before AI became a massive thing in fraud private investigations, our fraud private detective saw these scammers create all sorts of authentic-looking legal documents that they use to fool their victims.
Resumes, fake websites, and other online mediums which substantiate a scammer’s fraudulent storyline. Adept catfishing often involves complex webs of lies, and resumes, either online, via PDFs, or hardcopies, and other misleading websites about the catfishing perpetrator are just another sneaky tool they will use to trick others out of their cash.
Experienced catfishing scammers will always contact their victims via phone, messaging, and e-mails that are unregistered with big companies like Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Gmail, etc. This is because when they register these e-mails and phone numbers with regulated companies like these, they become so much easier to trace. Indeed, our skip tracers can have an easy time doing a skip trace service upon registered phone numbers and e-mail addresses, but unregistered e-mail addresses and phone numbers make the lives of social media private investigators so much more difficult.
When fraudsters catfish people with phone numbers, messages, and e-mails from spoofing apps, Google Voice, etc., it makes it much more difficult for digital private investigators to track down the identity of the people responsible for the catfishing. Indeed, this is exactly what the perpetrators are hoping for. They do not want their catfishing victims to find out their information and turn them into law enforcement.
To obtain someone’s information who is using a spoofing app or even a Google Voice number, the victim must know the name of the app or cloaking device the perpetrator is using, but finding this out is much easier said than done. Even if our social media private detectives can make this determination, the victim will then need to hire an attorney to subpoena the records from that company.
Without an attorney, the companies will not usually take the subpoena seriously. Even with a civil lawyer to help with the subpoena process, if the company that owns the spoofing app is located overseas, they may just ignore the subpoena completely. Scammers know this, and this is why they do not use registered communication mediums.
To conceal their identity, most scammers will decline to meet their victims in person or via video chat. Instead, our digital private investigator points out that they will continually find some excuse as to why they cannot meet or video chat. Instead, they will prefer more private communication mediums, such as cloaked voice chats, text messaging, and e-mails that allow them to mask what they look like, and which also provide additional anonymity.
As you can see, these scammers use social media catfishing and other forms of catfishing to trick, manipulate, and steal from their victims. They will stop at nothing to make their victims part with their hard-earned money. Experienced cat fishing schemes are often complex, well thought-out, and well-rehearsed.
People who are socially inept sometimes choose to catfish others. As example of this includes a man who pretends to be female so he can talk to other females. This may happen in a lesbian dating profile or via a messaging app, but the perpetrator may believe that if the female knew he was a male that she would not want to talk with him at all. In some ways, the person who is catfishing the female might even partly feel bad about his actions, but his desire to speak to females and his expectation that no females would ever really want to speak with him overrides this hesitation and causes him to proceed anyway with the victimization.
When the female finds out that the person she has been talking to is indeed male and not a female, she will feel betrayed. Whereas she might have wanted a friendship or even a romantic relationship with the guy if he had simply been honest upfront about his gender, she would not want anything to do with him. Our fraud private detective notes the importance that trust plays in all relationships, and in its absence where one party has catfished another, the interest will not exist.
As stated earlier, people like romance scammers will use catfishing as part of larger financial exploitation schemes. Their primary goal is scamming their intended targets out of their money. These perpetrators will gladly utilize catfishing and whatever else they must as manipulative techniques to harm their victims. Money is all these scammers seek, and they will do whatever they must to get it into their hands.
Likewise, rapists will sometimes use catfishing to sexually exploit their victims. This can even happen to children. Their intention may to get their victims to trust them and then meet up with them in person so they can rape them. Our rape private investigators see too many serial rapists who have tricked people of every gender, race, age, and socioeconomic background into brutal sexual assaults and sometimes even their own homicide.
Other sex criminals will use catfishing as a form of sextortion to get their victims to trust them. They may then ask their victims to send nude pics, especially if they are vulnerable children. They then turn around and threaten their sexual abuse victims into sending them money under the dire threat of sharing their nude photos with others like the situation that happened with a fifteen-year-old girl named Amanda Todd.
Aydin Coban eventually received a six-year prison sentence in Holland for his actions, but not before a video of Amanda Todd went viral as she shared the relentless bullying at her school over her bare breasts. Amanda Todd, only fifteen years old, committed suicide over the matter.
Our human trafficking private investigators also wish to remind our readers that sex traffickers will also sometimes use catfishing as one of many methods they have of luring their victims into trusting them. Then they force or coerce their sex trafficking victims into performing sexual acts so their sex traffickers, also known as pimps, can profit financially.
As mentioned earlier, some people utilize catfishing as a medium through which they can blackmail their intended victims into giving them money. Our blackmail private investigators conduct extortion private investigations on a regular basis for a wide variety of clients. From threatening to expose adulterous relationships, explicit images, sensitive personal information, or other things which may lead a person to part with their hard-earned money, this is never okay but does not stop these perpetrators from harming others.
Some people who engage in catfishing are not seeking to profit financially or to rape or murder anyone. They may simply lack friends, hobbies, and may think that catfishing is “fun” and provides sick, twisted “entertainment” for them. Of course, behavior like this is exactly why these INCELS remain single! If they would instead improve their social skills, they would find more success and would not feel the need to victimize others in this manner.
Most perpetrators of catfishing schemes tend to fit into different four main criminal offender profiles. Our digital private detectives have listed these below as follow:
Psychopaths and sociopaths have no empathy or conscience, and they do not care who they hurt. These maniacs have little-to-no remorse for the terrible things they do, provided their actions achieve their evil ends. Our psychopath private investigators. Psychopaths and sociopaths are much more likely to become serial rapists, mass murderers, serial killers, and more.
These people view themselves as much more important than others. The same thing goes with their wants and needs. Provided they get what they want, it does not matter who they hurt. They never view themselves as being “wrong,” and they seldom seek counseling or therapy because they do not believe they need it. Interacting with these people is like making a phone call but never having an opportunity to leave a message.
Sadists love inflicting pain and other harm upon others. Thus, catfishing is just one of many techniques in their repertoire of sadistic, torturous mechanisms of pain. Whether they use it for financial gain, to inflict sexual violence, to murder their victims, or simply to bully others, our perpetrator private detective denotes that they will derive more pleasure from the infliction of pain than any monetary or sexual benefit they receive from their victims.
Unlike sadists who focus on the intentional infliction of pain and suffering for the sake of the pain and suffering itself, Machiavellians seek personal gain and profit. These perpetrators use catfishing to gain personal wealth, power, advantage, sexual gratification, and whatever else will help them get what they want for their own personal gain.
Perpetrators of catfishing schemes usually have their victim type. Each type of victim comes with various “advantages” and “disadvantages” that these master manipulators can mold to their various entropy. Below we shall briefly discuss three types of common victim profiles, as noted below:
Young children and teens are not typically the ones that romance scammers looking for money will seek out, because most young kids and teens do not have money to take. Plus, our romance scam private detective notes that kids and teens are often very technologically-savvy. Thus, they are less prone to common scamming tricks that use technology that these perpetrators find much easier to catfish older victims with.
Instead, sex traffickers, perpetrators of sextortion, rapists, kidnappers, serial killers, and others seek out kids’ and teens’ natural curiosity and naivete to victimize them for their bodies, as drug mules, and forced human trafficking labor, among other crimes.
Older, less tech-savvy adults, especially those who are lonely, are easy targets for catfishing in romance scams. They may feel so happy that a military general, famous actor/actress, hot beautiful young lady/man, etc., has taken an “interest” in someone who would not normally be the kind that these individuals would seek out as partners. But suddenly these older, rich men of high social status or young, hot, males/females/nonbinary people make them feel as though they have come alive again with a new vigor for life that new relationships can sometimes bring.
Despite this glaring red flag that should serve as a strong warning signal to these older people that their new “romantic” interest is a scammer out to steal their money, our catfishing private investigator notes that their older, less technologically savvy brains make them less likely to catch on and be perceptive. If they are especially lonely older adults, then this only adds even more minuses to their perception checks. Thus, catfishing scammers especially prefer to target older, lonely, less technologically savvy adults.
As noted earlier, lonely people of all ages are more vulnerable to catfishing. Their desire for love, companionship, or just someone to talk to can sometimes make people do all kinds of unhealthy things they might not otherwise do. From agreeing to kill others to sending money and sending nude pics of their bodies, the possibilities for perpetrators to harm others who are lonely is sadly limitless.
Our catfishing private investigators at our private investigation agency have several key techniques to help catch scammers and others trying to catfish their victims via social media private investigations. Some of these many investigative techniques include, but are by no means limited to, the following:
Our relationship scam private investigators are skilled at running social media scans on suspected fraudulent individuals. From suspected rapists, murderers, dating scammers, bullies, and more, you can hire a private investigator at our private detective agency to help pull up all kinds of background information that the Internet has about them.
We can pull up information from major social media platforms like Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other dating and romance sites. Perpetrators and their friends and acquaintances, as well as online sleuths and previous victims and/or their family members/friends often post photos, videos, make confessions, and more. Some even proudly boast of their crimes, daring law enforcement officers to arrest them.
Social media scans are also excellent tools for finding jail booking photos, news stories about criminal arrests that perpetrators may have previously had expunged. Indeed, some criminals will work hard to scrub the Internet of any evidence or allegations of their past deeds, to prevent future victims, romantic partners, and friends from knowing about their past transgressions. Digital private investigations come in extremely handy in helping to bring these to light.
Our skip trace services can help track down scammers by checking out their registered phone numbers and e-mail addresses. We can also identify and locate them from their names, social security numbers, driver’s license number, dates of birth/age ranges, previous residential addresses, etc. Our PI agency can provide this identification and location information to our clients and law enforcement alike, and we can also use it to have our agency’s process servers in OKC give these predators with victim protection orders (VPOs) and other civil and criminal documents.
As noted earlier elsewhere in this page, the numbers and e-mail addresses we use to skip trace the perpetrators must be registered with regulated, recognized companies like Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, etc., for the skip trace to work effectively. If the perpetrator used a spoofing app or some other masking/cloaking device to make the call or send the text or email, then the individual’s identity and location information will not show up.
The same is true if the person moved recently, fled the country, is in a mental health facility/prison/nursing home, or is living with someone else who pays all the bills. Our skip tracers may be able to pull an individual’s identity via skip tracing, but the results will not show where the individual moved to in these circumstances.
Sometimes or dating scam private investigators choose to catfish those who are catfishing our clients. It is like doing countersurveillance upon someone who is surveilling our clients. Our private detective agency also has pre-made fake profiles it can use to lure these perpetrators into revealing their true identities, and some experts on YouTube and TikTok openly show their audiences how they are scamming scammers online in retaliation for the harm they are causing others. Indeed, many people find such videos to be highly entertaining.
Once our private detective agency identifies who the perpetrators are, our social media scan private detective can also conduct national criminal and civil background checks to see just how extensive these criminals’ bad backgrounds are. Many of our clients want to know what kinds of people with whom they are dealing. They know the perpetrators are bad, but they often prefer to know just how bad.
Sometimes when our client or catfishing private investigator comes across the license plate number for a suspected perpetrator, we can run it to see those to whom the car/truck is registered. Our legal experts can then use this information to run deeper civil and criminal background checks, social media scans, or perform any of the other extensive list of private investigation techniques we utilize to help solve catfishing crimes.
When perpetrators strike and use catfishing scams as a part of their crimes, they may use AI-made videos and photos or even face swapped photos to trick their intended victims. Not to fear though, because our licensed private investigators have the needed training and skills to use special detection devices which can detect fraudulent videos and photos.
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