Social Catfish Review

Social Catfish (socialcatfish.com), run by SocialCatfish, LLC in California and operating since March 2013 by its own account, describes itself as an online dating investigation service. You enter a name, email, phone number, username, address or upload a photo (JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP or WebP up to 10 MB), and it searches its records and the web for matching social, dating and work profiles, contact details and public records such as criminal records, bankruptcies, licenses and liens. The image search can detect multiple faces in a photo and lets you run a separate report for each, and the Image Search plan adds what Social Catfish calls RIS PRO features: AI image detection, hidden data identification and possible identity.

Results sit behind a paid membership: you run a search, then pick a plan at a payment page before results unlock. Social Catfish says the person you search is never notified. It also offers a free Privacy Lock exposure scan and a Protect Browser extension for Chrome. Its own disclaimer says it is not a consumer reporting agency, so results may not be used for employment, tenant screening, credit or insurance decisions under the FCRA, and that its data may not be accurate, complete or up to date.

Membership plans on the live membership page:

The yearly toggle is labelled 20% off. That matches the 500 and 1,200 tiers ($1,188 and $2,388 at 12 monthly payments) but the 250 tier works out to about 16% off ($600 vs $503). Each Pro card says its searches are "for one billing cycle"; the page does not say whether a yearly plan gets the monthly allowance each month or once a year.

The FAQ describes a different structure: a trial billed at $6.48 (social search) or $6.87 (image search) for the first 3 days, then $28.94 or $28.97 every 30 days; another FAQ answer says the trial is 5 days. It also mentions token plans where 1 token equals 1 matched result. These figures do not match the $36 membership page, so check the price shown at checkout before you pay. Cancellation is under Manage Account, Plan Info. The refund policy says to call 844-422-8347; the membership page promises a refund if they cannot find the information.

Prices checked on the vendor's pricing page on November 2, 2026. See Social Catfish membership levels and Social Search Pro.

What Social Catfish's own pages list:

Social Catfish suits people who have met someone on a dating app or social network and want to check whether their photos and story hold up before sending money or meeting, and people tracing where their own photos are being used. It bundles photo search and US people search in one subscription, so it saves stitching together several tools for a one-off check.

If you only need to find where a photo appears online, try the free Google Lens or TinEye first. For face-based search specifically, FaceCheck.ID and PimEyes are dedicated tools. If you want to remove your own details from people-search sites such as this one, Incogni is built for that. Do not use any of these for hiring or tenant decisions; that requires an FCRA-compliant background check.

On Trustpilot Social Catfish has a TrustScore of 2.0 from 569 reviews, with a split distribution: 58% five-star and 37% one-star, and 49 reviews in the last 12 months (profile claimed since December 2019). Positive reviews describe confirming that a romance contact was a scammer; the most-mentioned topics include spam, refund and subscription, and recent one-star reviews include a person who says he spent 15 months trying to get his own information removed from the site. As with all people-search services, the people being searched are not customers and may object to their data being listed.