Guide
Short answer
Verify the specific claims they made rather than trying to profile them: reverse image search their photos, confirm their claimed employer exists in a corporate registry, check any professional licence in the regulator's public register, and check when their company's domain was registered. A consistent absence of corroboration across every claim is the strongest signal of a fabricated identity.
5 of 6 steps below you can run yourself for nothing. 4 things in this area cannot be done lawfully by anyone.
The situation
You've been talking to someone for weeks. Something feels slightly off, or a friend raised an eyebrow, or they've started mentioning money. You want to know if they're real before you go further.
6 steps
In order of yield. Every step marked “do it yourself” is one you can run without us, with the cost stated where there is one.
Step 01
Free, fast, and the single most decisive step. Upload their photos to Google Images, TinEye, and Yandex — Yandex is notably better at faces. If the same face appears under a different name, or the photos trace to a stock library or a model's portfolio, you have your answer and you do not need anything else on this list.
Step 02
Search the corporate registry for the exact company name they gave you — Corporations Canada federally, Québec's REQ, and BC Registries are all free. A business that does not appear in any registry, or one incorporated three months ago while they claim a decade of operation, is a serious flag.
Step 03
If they say they are a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or financial advisor, the relevant Canadian regulator publishes a free public register. Search their name. A claimed credential that does not resolve to a real registrant is conclusive, and a licence held under a materially different name is worth asking about.
Step 04
A WHOIS or RDAP lookup shows when a domain was registered. A business claiming fifteen years of operation on a domain registered last spring is the most common tell in investment and business-opportunity fraud. The Wayback Machine will also show whether the site existed before this year.
Step 05
Reported decisions on CanLII are free. Sanctions lists are free. Bankruptcy and court docket searches are fee-bearing but cheap. A prior fraud judgment or an insolvency history that contradicts a claimed wealthy lifestyle is exactly the kind of contradiction worth paying for.
Step 06
Real people accumulate a consistent paper trail with plausible dates. Fabricated identities have a characteristic shape: a business in no registry, a credential with no registrant, a domain weeks old, a claimed career with no trace before this year. Any one of these can have an innocent explanation. All of them together do not.
Honest limits
Not a paywall and not a coverage gap. Each of these is either absent from every Canadian public record or unlawful to obtain — and anyone selling it to you is misrepresenting what they have, or committing an offence to get it.
Read their messages or see who else they're talking to
Interception of private communications is an indictable offence under Criminal Code s.184. Not a service gap — a crime.
Find all their social media accounts
Canada's Privacy Commissioner held in the Clearview AI findings that harvesting publicly-visible social profiles is a collection requiring consent. We confirm profile URLs you already have; we do not enumerate someone's accounts.
Run a criminal record check on them
In Canada only police services and the RCMP issue criminal record checks, and they require the subject's consent. No online service can lawfully provide one.
Find out if they're married
Marriage records are held by provincial vital statistics offices and are restricted to the parties and immediate family. There is no public marriage index in Canada.
Everything we decline at every tier, with the reason for each
Before you pay
If you do need it
This tier will not include
Questions
Refusing or repeatedly failing to video call. A story that requires them to be unreachable — offshore rig, deployed overseas, working in a remote mine. Moving the conversation off the platform quickly. Escalating emotional intensity within days. And the decisive one: any request for money, cryptocurrency, gift cards, or help moving funds, regardless of how the request is framed.
Sometimes, and rarely through the profile itself. A reverse image search on their photos occasionally surfaces the same face under a real name elsewhere. If they gave you a company, the corporate registry names its directors. If they gave you a professional credential, the regulator's register names the registrant. Working from the claims outward is far more productive than working from the profile inward.
Verifying that a person is who they say they are, before you meet a stranger or send them money, is ordinary caution — and the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre reports tens of millions of dollars in annual romance fraud losses. Verifying a presented identity is different from building a dossier on someone, which is why this service is scoped to confirming or contradicting the specific claims made to you.
Do not send it, and do not send it in any form — not crypto, not gift cards, not a wire, not by receiving and forwarding a payment, which makes you a money mule. Report it to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre. A request for money from someone you have never met in person is, on its own, sufficient reason to stop, whatever the records show.
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