Somebody has sent you a picture and something about the situation rests on it. A flat that is available right now if you send a deposit today. A person who looks a little too composed. A photo proving the parcel was delivered, the work was finished, the car has no rust.
The old advice was to look closely. That advice has expired. A convincing image now costs a few seconds and nothing at all, which makes it the cheapest part of any scam — cheaper than a fake profile, cheaper than a phone number.
What follows is what you can actually establish, roughly in the order worth trying.
Start with a reverse image search, not with us
If the picture was stolen from somewhere rather than generated, a reverse search finds it in seconds and you are done. Google Images, TinEye and Yandex all accept an uploaded file, and Yandex is noticeably better at faces and interiors.
This catches the most common fraud by a wide margin. Most scammers do not generate anything: they take a real estate photo from a listing in another city, or a real person's holiday pictures. A generated image is the harder case, not the usual one.
Do the search first. It is faster, and a match ends the question.
Then ask for the original file
This is the single most useful thing you can do, and almost nobody does it.
When a picture travels through WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram or a marketplace's own chat, the platform re-encodes it and throws away everything the camera or the generator wrote inside. What you received is a copy with its history erased. Checking that copy tells you very little, and that is not a limitation of any particular tool — the information is simply gone.
So ask: "Could you send that as a file rather than as a photo?" In Telegram and WhatsApp there is a literal "send as document" option that leaves the file untouched. On a phone, sharing from the gallery via email usually preserves it too.
Two things then happen, and both are informative.
If you get the original, you can check it properly. Drop it into SynthCheck and you will see what is inside: the camera and lens if it came from a camera, the date, sometimes the place, and — if it was generated by AI and nobody cleaned up — the actual prompt somebody typed.
If the answer is a reason why they cannot, that is data too. "My phone deleted it", "it was sent to me as well", "I don't know how" — these are all possible and all true sometimes. But a person selling a flat they own can photograph it again from the window, right now, with a piece of paper in shot. Someone who cannot produce a single original of anything is worth a second thought.
What a check can tell you, and what it cannot
Assume you have the file. Here is the honest shape of the answer.
The strong result. Some pictures declare their own origin. Image generators write the prompt, the model and the seed straight into the file, and almost nobody removes them; some cameras and AI tools attach a cryptographically signed record of how the picture was made. When one of those is present the question is largely settled, and a signature can be verified on the spot.
The useful middle. Even with all the labels gone, the shape of a file says something. AI models produce a small set of fixed sizes that camera sensors do not. Generated images are compressed with the default settings of free software rather than with the settings a camera manufacturer tuned. Any one of these has an innocent explanation; several together are a pattern worth taking seriously.
The common outcome. Very often the answer is cannot tell. That is not a failure and it is not a hint. A screenshot carries no information about what it is a screenshot of. Neither does an image saved from a social feed. Any tool that gives you a confident percentage on a file like that is inventing it.
What no tool can do. Nothing about a file tells you who is on the other end of the conversation. A perfectly genuine camera photograph proves that a camera existed, not that it belongs to the person messaging you, and not that they took it.
The checks that are worth more than the picture
Because the photograph is usually the weakest evidence available, and people fixate on it.
Ask for something that cannot be prepared in advance. A specific photo, taken now, with an arbitrary detail in it: a hand with three fingers raised, today's date on a scrap of paper, a particular corner of the room. A stolen or generated image cannot satisfy an arbitrary request made in the moment. This is worth more than any file analysis, and it costs one message.
Suggest a short video call. Not for face-checking — for the reaction. Someone with a real flat and a real name arranges one. The excuses are the answer.
Check the thing, not the picture. A land registry entry, a company number, a building on a map with the same window layout. For a rental, the single most effective move is to ask for the address and look it up: fraudulent listings collapse the moment the address is checked against anything.
Notice the pressure. Urgency is the constant across every version of this. A deposit today because there are three other viewers. A price that only holds until this evening. Generated photographs are new; pressure to decide before you can check is not.
If money has already moved
Contact your bank immediately and say the word "fraud" — some transfers can still be recalled within hours, and almost none after a day. Report it to the platform, which can at least stop the same account reaching someone else, and to your national fraud line. Keep the original messages and files rather than screenshots of them: a screenshot loses everything the file contained, including the timestamps.
The short version
Reverse image search first. Ask for the original file, and treat the answer as information either way. Check whatever the picture is about — the address, the company, the registration — because that is checkable in a way a photograph is not. Ask for something arbitrary and immediate. And treat urgency as the signal it almost always is.
The picture is the part that is easiest to fake and the part everyone looks at hardest. It deserves less of your attention than it gets.
Check a photo now — nothing is uploaded, the file is read on your own device.