Graham had been on the site eleven days when the message arrived that made him feel about ten feet tall. She was thirty-eight. She was apparently in Solihull, twelve minutes from his office. And she had read his profile closely enough to ask him about the fishing.
Three messages later she wanted to move to WhatsApp. Six messages after that she wanted to talk about a problem with her car finance.
He didn’t send a penny. But he spent the following week feeling faintly stupid, which is arguably the more expensive outcome, because it very nearly put him off the whole thing before he’d properly started.
Here’s what he’d tell anyone signing up now. The people who get caught out aren’t gullible. They’re hopeful, slightly out of practice, and in more of a hurry than they’d ever admit. That’s a completely different problem, and it’s a much easier one to fix.
Three groups, not one
It helps to stop thinking about “fake profiles” as a single category, because you’re actually sorting between three very different sorts of people and only one of them is genuinely dangerous.
There are manufactured profiles — accounts built to harvest attention, push traffic somewhere else, or simply pad out a platform’s numbers. There are scammers, who are real human beings running a script with money at the end of it. And then there are time-wasters: entirely genuine, entirely harmless people who are never, ever going to meet you.
The first two you want gone within a message or two. The third group is the one that quietly costs most married daters their patience, because they look exactly like the real thing for weeks on end.
What a manufactured profile looks like in 2026
The old advice — look for blurry photos and broken English — has stopped working. Anyone can produce a fluent, warm, grammatically flawless paragraph now, and anyone can produce a face to go with it. So the tells have moved.
Photographs are still the best place to start, but you’re looking for something different than you were five years ago. Real people’s photo sets are messy. There’s a good one from a wedding, a bad one squinting in a garden, something from four years and a haircut ago. A manufactured set tends to be strangely consistent: same lighting, same angle, same flawless skin, no clutter, no other people, no weather. Britain shows up in almost every genuine British photograph — a pub garden, a car park, a grey sky, somebody’s Christmas tree. If nothing in the pictures could place this person anywhere in particular, notice that.
The writing tells have shifted too. What you’re looking for now isn’t bad English; it’s an absence of specifics. Genuine profiles mention the M6, the school run, a dog, a job they’re bored of, a band they saw in 1997. Manufactured ones talk almost entirely in feelings — honesty, loyalty, chemistry, laughter — and never once say anything that could be checked against anything.
And the oldest tell of all still holds. A profile that is dramatically more attractive, more available and more instantly interested than everything else you’ve seen that week deserves a second look, not a faster reply.
The single best test: which way is the conversation being pulled?
If you only remember one thing from all of this, make it this one.
Watch where they want the conversation to go, and how quickly. Scammers need you off the platform, fast, because the platform has moderators, reporting tools and a record of everything. A personal mobile number, WhatsApp, Telegram, a private email address — all of it moves you somewhere nobody is watching and nothing can be traced.
Now think about who you’re supposed to be talking to. A married person on a married dating site has more reason to stay on the platform than you do, not less. They don’t want your number sitting in their phone any more than you want theirs sitting in yours. In practice, genuine members are usually the ones suggesting you keep things on-site a little longer.
So when someone attached, discreet and famously cautious is pushing hard for your mobile number on day two, one of those words isn’t true.
The money moment always arrives dressed as something else
Nobody asks you for money. That’s the part people get wrong when they picture how this happens to somebody.
What arrives instead is a problem. A car that failed its MOT the week before she was going to drive down and see you. A phone contract cut off. A mother in hospital in Manchester. A payment stuck with customs. A locked account that will free up on Monday, honestly, and could you just cover it until then. By the time an actual number is mentioned you’ve had three weeks of lovely conversation and it feels churlish to say no to £180.
The newer version doesn’t ask at all. It offers. A conversation drifts towards a clever little investment she’s been doing rather well out of, there’s a screenshot of a balance, an app you’ve never heard of, and the money you put in even goes up for a fortnight before it vanishes. Fraud investigators have a blunt name for that one, and it takes people for far more than the old sob-story version ever did.
One rule covers every variation, and it’s short enough to remember when you’re flattered and tired: no money moves in either direction with someone you have not met in person. Not lent. Not invested. Not just this once. A genuine person will be entirely unbothered by that rule, because it will simply never come up.
The threat that’s specific to married daters
There is one vulnerability that comes with the territory here, and it’s worth naming plainly rather than tiptoeing around.
An ordinary romance scammer wants your bank details. Someone targeting a married person has a second option available: leverage. Explicit photographs, a recognisable face, a workplace mentioned in passing, a wife’s first name — assembled together, that’s a blackmail package, and the demand tends to arrive within hours of the last photo being sent.
The defences are dull and they work. Keep your face and your body in separate photographs. Don’t send anything containing a wedding ring, a distinctive tattoo, a company lanyard, a number plate or your own hallway. Use password-protected photos so you control who sees what and can take that access away again. And be genuinely slow with anyone who escalates towards explicit content faster than they escalate towards actually meeting you — that mismatch is the signal, far more than the request itself.
If it does happen, the worst possible move is paying. It funds the next demand rather than ending this one. Screenshot everything, block, report the account to the site, and report it to Action Fraud. It feels unthinkable to involve anybody at all. It’s still the right call, and the people taking that report have heard several versions of it already this month.
The duller problem: people who are never going to meet you
Most of the time you wasted last month wasn’t taken by a criminal. It was taken by somebody perfectly nice.
There’s the fantasy chatter, who wants the messaging and only the messaging, and who will keep it going for months if you let them. There’s the perpetual “soon” — a real, attached, genuinely interested person whose circumstances never quite clear. There’s the one who is warm all week and disappears from Friday lunchtime to Monday morning without ever mentioning it. And there’s the one still working out whether they want to do any of this, which is fair enough, but it isn’t your job to fund the deliberation with your evenings.
None of them are villains. They’re just not aligned with you, and the kindest thing you can do for everyone involved is find that out early rather than in November.
The way to do it isn’t interrogation. It’s saying what you’re looking for, out loud, reasonably soon — that you’re enjoying the messaging, and that you’re hoping it turns into a coffee in the next few weeks. Then watch what happens. You’re looking for a pattern rather than a single excuse, because anyone can have a bad fortnight. But three postponements with three good reasons is still three postponements.
The five-minute check
You don’t need to become an investigator. You need about five minutes and a bit of unhurried curiosity.
Take one of their photographs and run a reverse image search on it — right-click, search image, and see whether that face belongs to a modelling agency, a stock library or somebody’s abandoned Instagram. Ask one specific local question, the sort that can’t be bluffed: which way they come off the ring road, where they’d park in town, whether that pub near the station is still worth bothering with. Suggest a short video call before meeting, not as a test but as the normal thing two careful people do — and note that the reaction to the suggestion tells you more than the call itself will. Then look at the shape of the account: how long it’s been active, whether the profile is properly filled in, whether the photos have been verified.
After that, meet somewhere public, in daylight, and tell one friend where you are. Every experienced married dater has a version of this routine, and not one of them finds it unromantic.
What a decent site should be doing for you
Some of this really shouldn’t be your job.
A serious platform checks profiles before they go live, moderates in-house rather than leaving it to members to police each other, keeps its membership genuinely UK-based, and gives you tools that put you in charge of your own exposure — password-protected photographs being the obvious example.
Membership balance matters more than people realise, too. A site skewed heavily male is a site where fake female profiles are commercially useful to somebody, and where the pressure to reply to anyone at all is that much higher. IllicitEncounters has run since 2004 with a membership of roughly 45% women to 55% men across more than 1.5 million UK members, which is unusual in this corner of the internet and is a large part of why the messages that land in your inbox tend to come from people who exist.
Careful isn’t the same as paranoid
The risk with an article like this is that you read it, decide everybody’s a fraud, and never reply to anyone again.
That would be a shame, and it would also be wrong. The overwhelming majority of people on a paid, moderated, UK-based married dating site are exactly who they say they are: someone in their forties with a school run, a quiet house and a fairly ordinary hope that somebody might find them interesting again.
Slowness is the entire trick. Scams need speed, because urgency is the only real weapon they have. A genuine connection is completely untroubled by two extra weeks of getting to know each other. So take the fortnight. If they’re real, you’ve lost nothing whatsoever. If they’re not, they’ll be gone by the end of it — and they’ll have taken nothing with them.
Questions people actually ask
How can I tell if a dating profile photo is fake?
Reverse image search is the quickest check — right-click and search the image. A stolen photo often turns up on a stock library or a stranger’s social media, whilst an AI-generated one usually returns nothing at all despite looking oddly flawless. After that, judge the set rather than the single picture. Genuine people have inconsistent lighting, dated haircuts and British weather in the background. If every shot could pass for a headshot, ask for a casual one taken this week.
Is it safe to give someone my mobile number?
Eventually, yes — but there’s no rush, and the person pushing for it early is exactly the one to be careful with. Keep things on the site until you’ve had a proper conversation and ideally a short video call. When you do swap numbers, use a second one if you can: a cheap pay-as-you-go SIM or a free calling app costs almost nothing and keeps your everyday phone out of it entirely. Genuine married daters understand that immediately, because most of them are doing the same.
What should I do if someone asks me to lend them money?
Say no, and treat the request itself as your answer rather than waiting for proof of anything. It doesn’t matter how small the sum is, how plausible the crisis sounds, or how long you’ve been talking. No money moves between people who haven’t met. Don’t lend, don’t send gift card codes, don’t move money to “help it clear”, and don’t invest in anything they’ve introduced you to. Then report the account, because they’ll be running the same script on a dozen other people.
Someone is threatening to send my photos to my wife. What do I do?
Don’t pay, and don’t reply. Paying funds the next demand rather than ending this one, and blackmailers who get money almost always come back. Screenshot the profile, the messages and any usernames, then block and report to the site. Report it to Action Fraud on 0300 123 2040 or through their website, and if intimate images are involved the Revenge Porn Helpline can get content taken down. Telling anyone feels impossible. It’s still the fastest way to make it stop.
How long should I chat before meeting in person?
Long enough to feel comfortable, short enough that it stays a real prospect — a fortnight to a month of decent conversation suits most people. Chat for too little and you’ve no real idea who’s turning up. Chat for too long and something odd happens: the imagined version overtakes the real one, and that first coffee is handed an impossible job. If you’ve been messaging happily for three months and no date has ever been proposed, you already have your answer about what this is.
The boring bit takes five minutes
There’s a version of married dating where you’re cautious for six weeks and disappointed at the end of it. And there’s the version where you do the dull checks in five minutes, stop worrying, and get on with the far more enjoyable business of meeting someone.
Verified profiles, in-house moderation and a membership of real UK adults are a large part of why people stay with IllicitEncounters for years rather than weeks. If you’d rather spend your evenings talking to people who actually exist, you know where we are.
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