TL;DR: Use reverse image search, pullpush's search function, common fucking sense, a crude verification method, and burner phone number/social media accounts to avoid geting catfished, doxxed, or taken advantage of.

Hi all.

I've been posting and browsing R4R's for around 5 months. It has been a love/hate experience. Among meeting amazing, fun, sexy people, I've had a lot (A LOT) of people try to catfish me, be extremely creepy and pushy, or otherwise waste my time and energy. The ratio of real-to-fake people as a man seeking women is probably at best 1:3, and at worst 1:10. I imagine the situation is much, much worse for women. I'm frankly surprised I don't see more posts talking about this.

In an effort to keep this community (read: loveable dumpster fire) a more safe and less full of horseshit, here are a few tools which can help you not get catfished, doxxed, or otherwise taken advantage of:

1) Reverse Image Search: https://lens.google.com/

I am amazed how few people know about this. This is a tool which lets you upload an image into a search engine to check if and where it's been posted previously. There are a few options here, I use google's.

Lets say someone sends you pictures of 'them'. They're beautiful, and interested in you! Before you get your hopes up, upload the image they sent you into a reverse image search tool. You get to see whether it's been posted before on a porn site, a Latvian model's instagram, or by an onlyfans creator. You can resize the search area on the image and click "Find image source" to try and pull up more info.

If the picture isn't found elsewhere, or is only found attached to the reddit profile sending it to you, then they're actually plausibly not a catfish! Next step:

2) Pullpush: https://search.pullpush.io/

This is another truly amazing tool. I can only assume it works through magic and astrology. pullpush's search function lets you see a redditor's post history even if it's been deleted.

So, reverse image search told us someone's sent you photos that weren't posted on an obscure russian social media site a decade ago. You check their profile. It's empty, but has ~500 post karma for some reason. In these cases I've learned to check pullpush to see what they've posted previously and deleted.

I saw someone get absolutely got doing this a week ago on this very subreddit. They were posting one of those obnoxious, obviously fake "18 F4M come fuck me in my parents house my boyfriend with a tiny penis is out of town" posts. Someone in the comments ran their profile through pullpush and found posts from years earlier claiming to be both a 27 year old female and a 38 year old male. Needless to say, obvious catfish.

3) Common-goddamn-sense.

Is someone sending you pictures of themselves that look like cellphone screenshots? Is someone sending you low-quality pictures that look like they were taken on a Motorola Razor of their Scene haircut in a neon American Eagle T-Shirt? Is someone claiming they're the male in a male-female couple and sending you pictures of their 'wife', but refusing to involve her or send verification (super creepy, probably non-consensual, and deserving of its own post it happens so frequently)? Is someone's account 2 days old with no posts, or a bunch of /r/confessions posts titled "God I sure love being a woman with boobs", or posts on freekarma subs?

When reverse image search and pullpush can't help you, go with your gut. Skip these people, they will waste your time. Or don't, if you're a masochist and get off on psychological pain (no judgement).

4) Have people verify they're real in a quick, low stakes way.

Alright, so they've sent you real pictures, their profile doesn't have any red flags in their deleted post history, and they're passing the common-sense gut-check. No matter how tempting it is to skip this step, I send literally every person I'm talking with a selfie from the neck down with a less-than-common hand gesture and ask them to reply with a picture of them doing the same. It takes 3 seconds to imitate, it's not as sensitive as a face picture or a nude, and it cannot be faked. If the person you're talking to refuses to do this or makes bad excuses - yep, you guessed it, skip 'em.

Do not skip this step. I've seen maybe 10-20 accounts with: 1) pictures that didn't appear elsewhere through reverse image search, 2) no red flags on pullpush, 3) a very long, apparently legitimate post history with no common-sense red flags. When I've asked them to verify, these folks will try to spin the situation into outrage that you don't trust them, then say something like "I'm going out I can't send right now," or "I can't have my phone out at work."

In my experience, people who are real and legitimatley interested are happily willing to verify this way.

5) Burner phone numbers and social media.

Okay, they've passed all the checks. You're feeling excited. They seem keen as well! Sparks are flying, it's time to get off the godforsaken buggy mess that is reddit chat. You give out your phone number and BOOM. Doxxed. They're threatening to send pictures of your weird nipples to your boss and you're panicking. Your career's over, your life is over, you're reliving your most shameful nipple-related moments and...

You probably could've been avoided by 1) creating a burner snapchat, telegram, or phone number, 2) meeting someone publically (at a bar or coffee shop) to establish that they're at least modestly trustworthy, and 3) only giving any personal information to someone after they've proven they're trustworthy.

For Snapchat: Make a burner email and sign up. Disable all the annoying ways snapchat tries to make you discoverable to your contacts and social media. Dick pics ho'!

For Telegram: Use a phone number (ideally a burner, see below), disable showing your phone number to contacts, and have people add you by a username or QR code (not your phone number). Make it a disappearing chat and go to town.

For a Burner Number: A friend recommended I check out TextNow. It's an app that lets you send and receive texts, calls and pictures from a random phone number. There's an upgraded version but I haven't found it necessary. Similar apps exist, TextNow has done amazingly well for me.

In Summary:

When I started posting on R4R boards I thought it was magical. It was fun and sexy and easy. It was like tinder, but the meta rewards dick pics and transparency.

But this is still the internet. Despite the wonder of pushpull, magic and astrology aren't real. People will try to waste your time, people will try to take advantage of you, and people. will. try. to. catfish. you. It's on you as an individual to protect yourself against the bad actors in this community (read: dumspter fire) and to report these accounts if you come across them.

That said, stay safe with the above tools, stay patient, and you might meet someone where sparks can truly fly. You never know, maybe there really is a Latvian super model influencer who wants to sleep with you.

DW