Some accounts look like a magazine shoot. A few of them are people who have simply learned where to put a lamp; a few are working an angle. Eleven signals that tell the difference, three that fool people into suspecting the wrong person, and exactly what the report and block controls do here.
Start ChattingFree to start · Runs in your browser
The instinct arrives before the evidence does. A profile appears that is better lit, better framed and better looking than anything else you have seen that evening, and some part of your brain files it under "this is not real". Sometimes that instinct is right and it saves you an unpleasant twenty minutes. Just as often it is wrong, and it costs somebody a conversation for the crime of owning a decent lamp.
Worth separating the two things being judged: polish, which is a skill, and intent, which is a behaviour. Polish shows up in the photograph. Intent shows up in what happens over the next three minutes — what gets asked, how fast, and where the conversation is being steered. The list below is ordered roughly that way: the weak signals first, the ones that actually decide it further down.
People who spend hours on camera get good at it, the way people who cook a lot stop burning things. Better light, a background that is not a laundry pile, an angle that is not up the nose — all learnable in one evening. Treat "too good" as a question to hold in the back of your mind, not a verdict you have already reached.
A real person accumulates photographs by accident: bad haircuts, odd weather, a friend caught halfway through a sentence. An account with a single flawless image and nothing around it has usually been assembled rather than lived in. It is weak evidence on its own, and strong evidence in company with anything further down this list.
It takes about ten seconds on a phone: save the image, drop it into your search engine of choice, look at what comes back. If the same face turns up attached to five different names on five different sites, you are done and you have lost nothing. If it comes back with nothing, you have learned almost nothing — plenty of real photographs are simply not indexed anywhere.
Copy that reads like it was written for a brochure — travel, positivity, good vibes, looking for someone genuine — is copy that has been reused. Real descriptions tend to be specific and slightly badly written: a job nobody would invent, a team, a town you have to look up. Specific and clumsy beats smooth and general every time.
Flattery in the first fifteen seconds, before anything has been exchanged that could be admired, is pacing rather than chemistry. It is designed to make the next request feel like it comes from someone who already likes you. Notice the timing rather than the words, because the words are always pleasant.
An account that wants your other messaging app in the first two minutes is skipping the part where you decide whether you want them to have it. There is nothing wrong with moving a conversation eventually, and there is a lot wrong with moving it before the conversation exists. Off the site, none of the controls described below are still in reach.
For an account whose photographs are the whole pitch, a permanent refusal to appear live is the loudest thing on the page. Note the asymmetry that matters: plenty of ordinary people keep their camera off out of shyness and never mention their looks at all, which is a completely different pattern. It is the combination — flawless stills, no live video, constant reference to appearance — that is telling you something.
Ask for something ordinary and immediate: what the weather is doing out of the window, a wave, the name of the day. Anyone real does it without thinking about it. If the answer is a story about why not, take the story at face value and move on — pressing somebody to prove themselves is how you become the problem in the conversation.
Gift cards, crypto, a customs fee, a plane ticket, a sick relative, an investment that a friend is doing well out of. There is no version of this that ends with you better off, and no explanation worth listening to. You do not owe anybody a polite exit from a conversation that has turned into a request for payment.
When the first substantial message contains a link, a QR code or a channel name, the account is an advertisement wearing a face. The giveaway is that the pitch does not change no matter what you say, because it was never a reply to you. Close it, report it if you have thirty seconds, and get on with your evening.
Almost every item above has an innocent explanation on its own, and a good photograph is the most innocent of the lot. What is worth acting on is a cluster: perfect stills, immediate warmth, no live video, and a destination the conversation keeps drifting towards. One signal is noise, three signals in four minutes is a decision.
Worth knowing before you need them, because guessing wrong in the moment is how people end up doing nothing. Both controls live on the other person's profile page — not on the chat screen and not on the call screen, which is the assumption that costs people time when something has just gone wrong. Report opens its own page: you pick a reason from a list, write a short description of what happened, and you can attach a screenshot before you submit. Block is the other control on that profile, and what it does here is one sentence long — a person you block will not be matched to you again. It is not a permanent verdict either; a block can be lifted again later.
It is also worth keeping the base rate in view, because lists like this one quietly teach suspicion. Most of the people you meet on a random chat platform are exactly what they appear to be: somebody bored on a Tuesday, somebody practising a language, somebody who cannot sleep. Treating every attractive photograph as an operation costs you far more conversations than it saves you, and the people worth meeting are not obliged to look ordinary. The goal is not to catch everyone out — it is to notice when the same three signals arrive together, and to have already decided what you will do when they do.
The practical version: if something is wrong, end the conversation first and deal with the profile after. Nothing about reporting requires you to stay in a chat you want out of, and a description written thirty seconds later is still a good description. If the money angle is the one that showed up, that is worth reading about on its own — here is how paying on this site actually works — everything runs through the app's own store, so a stranger asking you to send something outside it has told you what they are.
Pick video, audio or text and find out for yourself — free to start.
Start Chatting