In a digital dating world where Catfishing is a very real concern for online daters, we need to take greater care to find out if your online hookup is real. Though dating in the digital age is a lot easier than it used to be before the internet, there are still some small things here and there that we have to be careful of. If you suspect that your online hookup might not be real, you might need to get to work on your cyber stalking ASAP depending on whether or not it's a date that you're setting up for the next day, or if you're arranging a booty call within the hour.

There are lots of different ways to tell if your hookup is real, but we feel like the quickest and easiest way is to ask them to write a word or two of your choosing on a piece of paper, and have them send you a picture of them holding the piece of paper with their face clearly visible in the picture. You can then compare that picture to the ones that are on their profile. If it's a match, you're good to go! Have a quick shower and get over there.

That's not always going to work depending on the situation (maybe they don't have paper or a pen around!) so let's take a look at some other ways to tell if your online hookup is real.

Facebook remains probably the biggest social network on the planet, so it makes sense that if someone is using the internet to find dates, then they're also going to be on Facebook. In fact, we'd say that even if your online hookup is a real person, if they aren't on Facebook, a couple alarm bells should go off in your head. It would suggest that they're behaving on their dating apps and sites in a way that they don't want to be traced back to a social media presence with their friends and colleagues. That's troubling.

A lot of sites and apps will connect to Facebook now, so that you can see if you have any mutual friends with someone that you're thinking about hooking up with. And while it's understandable to want to meet someone who doesn't have any connections to your social circle, it's also a little less certain when it comes to concerns that you might be talking to a fake person. The larger your Facebook friends list is, the likelier it is that you'll have "friends" that you're not actually friends with, who would serve as a great connection between you and your would-be online hookup. You don't have to worry about them creating drama in your circle of close friends, but you also have a bit of confirmation that they are who they say they are. The best of both worlds.

Do you have other friends who're using the same dating site or app as you? If not, do you have any that will sign up for them, just so that they can help out in a bit of a recon mission to find out if your hookup is real? The answer is most likely that you do. Once they have their logins set up, have them send a message to your hookup. When they get a response, ask them what they think. Do they think that you're potentially being scammed, or does it seem like a real person? After they've exchanged a decent number of messages with this person, compare notes. See if there were similarities to the correspondences. See if there were any replies that may have seemed like they were copied and pasted, or part of a routine.

Another great way that we like to sniff out a scammer or fake person with the help of our friends is to try and setup a date with them on the same day, and around the same time. Make sure your messages don't seem too similar of course. If it turns out that you have nothing to worry about, and this is a real person with real interest in hooking up with you on the other end of the message window, you don't want them to return your suspicion back to you, and think that you and your friend are scammer bots. So try and setup dates very close to each other. So close to each other that it's impossible for both dates to happen. If they reply to one of you that they can't that night because they have other plans, you're likely in the clear, and are chatting with an honest to goodness human hookup! Congratulations. If they agree to both dates though, you should block the user immediately, and report them to the site's admin so that they will hopefully remove their account to prevent other potential scams or Catfishings from happening.

Did you know that Google has a reverse image search function? It's true! So a great way to try and find out a bit more about your online hookups is by throwing their images into Google and utilizing this wonderful technology that they've developed. See if any of the pictures are already on the internet elsewhere. You can tell when someone's taken pictures expressly for their dating profile, and when people have taken old photos of themselves off of Facebook, so start your search off with one of the pictures that looks like a Facebook picture to see if you can find a Facebook profile with the picture on it. If there's a photo where they're posing with a friend or two, even better. It will allow you to not only search for your hookup's face, but also the faces of their friends. So increase your odds of finding someone that way, and then hopefully use some of your Facebook cyber stalking skills that we talked about earlier in this article.

If the reverse image search doesn't reveal any results, don't get discouraged. Do you know any personal information about your hookup? Searching for multiple things at once will increase your odds of finding some proof of life. If you don't know any information about your hookup past what's already listed on their profile, you might want to have a short conversation about their life, and hopefully you'll successfully pull out what you need to find more online information about them.

Earlier we mentioned that our favourite and easiest way to get confirmation that you're talking with a real person is asking someone to write something of your choice on a piece of paper, and then take a selfie while holding the paper. There's variations on this method that can be a little bit more playful. Remember that that it doesn't have to be something that they've written down. You can just as easily try to think of something that they're sure to have in their home, like a toothbrush, and ask them to take a selfie while holding that. The thought being that it's very unlikely that they'll already have a photo of themselves (or the person they're pretending to be if they're tricking you) holding a toothbrush.

Right up there with the photograph method that we described in the first paragraph, is picking up the phone and calling the person. We used to talk on the phone so much more than we used to, but we're still hooked on them, and so much of our online dating is actually done through the use of a cell phone. So if the person you're hooking up with seems to have a difficult time giving out personal information because of what seems like some sort of fear of being discovered as different from what their dating profile lists, we would suggest proceeding with caution. You could just be going to hookup with a lame person, OR someone who has every intention of tricking you. Either way, there isn't much benefit to the hookup; real or not.

If they refuse to give you their phone number, it's also a sign that they might not be everything they're claiming to be. Everyone is different, but we feel like if you want to hookup, you can give us your phone number! Phone numbers are often connected to Facebook accounts as well, so if you're able to get your hookup's number, there's a good chance that searching for it in Facebook could bring up their account. If it does, and you discover pictures of a young boy troll, you shouldn't be surprised. You also shouldn't continue messaging with them. Take some screenshots, and send them to your dating site's administrators.

A lot of people really like to use online dating platforms simply as a spot to find the people they're going to hook up with, and within their first handful of messages, will tell the other person that they prefer to take the discussion to texts or phone calls right away. Some people aren't comfortable with the quick move, as it feels a little more personal than they might be looking for without chatting a little bit first, but it's worth asking at the very least. You may find yourself chatting on the phone with a new potential partner for a couple hours, and realizing that you could instead be on your first date. The chemistry that comes through the phone is something that a lot of people are surprised by because of how little many people use their phone in the way it was originally intended these days.

If you're exchanging messages and their replies seem to be coming back to you faster than a person could actually type the reply, that's a big red flag. There are a lot of scammers out there who set up dating profiles and then have bots or scripts running on their computers to reply to people using prewritten canned responses that are meant to replicate a conversation. If you feel like you might be chatting with a bot, we suggest you try varying the style of your messages. Send a few curveballs that nobody could have planned a response for, because it has nothing to do with hooking up or getting to know someone. Another good method is sending the same message with a couple messages dividing them, to see if you get the same reply. If it's a real person, they're more likely to reply, "Why are you asking that again? I just told you..." to which you can just let them know that you're just making sure they're not a bot. Make your reply a bit lighthearted, and hope that they aren't offended by lack of trust. Since they're in the same boat as you, they should be fine with it.

It may seem after reading this article that the world of online dating is a high risk one, but in reality, online dating is a low risk and high reward activity. Don't be discouraged by a few bad apples. The world of online dating is like a giant apple tree, full of potential mates that will suit your taste and be ripe at the same time as you. If you find yourself at a high level of concern about potential fake hookups, and maybe aren't as computer savvy as you want to be in order to follow our steps to identifying a real online hookup and a fake one, you should ask a friend who's better with computers than you to help out. Far too many single people are using the internet to find partners, and if you were to cut internet dating out of your life, we're confident that you'll find that finding dates will be far more difficult than the last time you were single.

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