How to Find Someone’s Dating Profile: Expert Tips and Tricks
Cindy Ellis - March 3, 2023
Are you trying to figure out how to find someone’s dating profile? There are many reasons you might want to do this. For example, you might be going on a date with someone for the first time soon and want to know what they say about themselves. Perhaps you are even concerned that someone you are currently with has a hidden love life behind your back.
The big problem here is sometimes these profiles might not be so simple to find in the first place.
The good news is there are many low-impact and alternative ways to unveil these secret dating profiles and delve into the truth of an individual. After all, when someone commits to utilizing online dating and social media sites, they are effectively in the public eye and are subject to a certain degree of scrutiny. This applies to everyone, no matter who they might be.
In this guide, we’ll list some of the best, free, and completely legal ways to find hidden dating profiles so you are always informed about a potential problem partner that might be lurking in your near future.
7 Methods for Finding Someone’s Dating Profile
Finding someone’s dating profile may seem daunting, but there are actually many things you can use to search. Below, we list the seven best search methods for finding someone’s dating profile.
1) People Search
While you can search for hidden dating accounts on your own using Google or some other search engine, there are times when the search itself can be fruitless. You might end up with nothing more than pieces of information that lead absolutely nowhere. This is when you should take advantage of professional-grade reverse search services to take your data gathering to the next level.
Reverse search engine tools, such as the ones provided by Information.com, can pour over a ton of different databases and other publically-available repositories in mere minutes. These can include dating apps and social media accounts as well.
2) Name
One would think that if someone was trying to hide something online that they would not use their full legal name. Despite such common sense practices, it’s still quite common for cheaters to use their full name on a dating profile. Sometimes they will even use nicknames that can expose them even more.
This is a quick and easy first stage of the search process, but it gets tougher the more common the name of the person you are searching is. If the person has a nickname that all their closest friends know them by, however, you can also try that as well to hone your search.
3) Social Media
If you know that the person in question uses social media, take a look at their various profiles. Some dating apps even let you sign in with a pre-existing social media profile (like Facebook).
Tinder is a good example of this, as the practice of linking a social media profile with a dating app is believed to keep scammers and other people with bad intentions from taking advantage of the service.
This technique is also a shot in the dark for finding hidden dating info on a person, as many social media profiles can be completely hidden from the public via user settings. This only works if you already know the person’s social media details (username, URL, etc.); even then, it can be quite a long shot.
4) Email Address
While email addresses might not be the most popular means of communication anymore, most of the time, one is still required to sign up for most dating sites.
Using a search engine like Google or Bing will sometimes expose a connection between a dating site and a particular email address, though this can be quite rare. Most of the time, truly stealthy partners who are adept at cheating will have an alternative email address for these websites and apps.
5) Usernames
The person you are searching for might very well use one username across multiple social media and/or dating platforms. This is a common practice because so many people don’t want to memorize several different log-ins depending on what they are doing (even if it’s regarding cheating on someone or being deceptive in general).
6) Phone Number
Similar to how many dating sites require a social media account to be linked to them, many also require a working phone number. This helps in the authentication process and keeps scammers down to a minimum, especially since many phone numbers are hard-linked to real-world accounts that contain data about an individual that can be used in a criminal trial (if malicious activity occurs). It’s a common and effective way to ensure safety on these dating sites.
Quite a few social media sites, such as Instagram and LinkedIn, allow you to search for individuals via a phone number. This might be an effective way of finding secondary dating profiles if you know your partner’s primary phone number.
7) Google Image Search
We left this one for the very last because it’s not nearly as effective as the other methods here. As mentioned before, many of these sites block access to things like photos, usernames, and other information to search engines, depending on user settings. This isn’t too different when someone tweaks their Facebook settings to ensure that their posts won’t appear in search engines.
If this is a tactic you want to try out, what’s the best way to do it? Let’s say you have a picture of your significant other or someone else you presume to be cheating currently; then you can use the massive search capabilities of Google Images to see if their photo is being used on any of these social media or dating sites.
Google Images has advanced reverse image search capabilities where you can drag and drop an image of the person in question onto their search bar and find the results of where that particular photograph is being used as a profile photo. If the person is using that photograph, it will show up in the search results on Google showing the site where the photo is being used.
Alternative Methods for Finding Someone’s Dating Profile
While these methods might seem a bit more elusive and less conclusive than the search methods above, they can sometimes get results.
Create Your Own Dating Profile
One sneaky yet effective way of initiating counterintelligence on a cheating partner in question is to covertly create profiles of your own on popular dating websites and apps.
Many of these are free to join, and having your own profile can give you the agency necessary to track down the person you have in mind. You can do this by creating an entirely fake persona and fine-tuning it based on the individual’s preferences, such as age, sexual orientation, hobbies, and other subjects you find pertinent.
This can be quite time-consuming, so it’s best to do this only if you’re certain the cheater in question uses these websites and apps. There’s also a slightly negative ethical component to this technique as well. Technically, using a site or an app for this purpose is highly deceptive and more than likely against their terms and conditions. This is something of a last-resort option and only if the desperation is eating at you from within.
Ask Your Friends for Assistance
If the previous point seemed a bit too deceptive for you, then perhaps getting the help of your loyal pals might be in the cards. If you have friends using these dating apps and sites, see if they can find the person you’re looking for.
This can be an especially good tactic if the person doesn’t know all of your friends. This can allow your pal to gather all kinds of data, including screenshots of the offending party’s deception.
The only downside to this is that many friends, depending on their level of comfort with the notion, will not want to get involved or risk their own account getting canceled or limited in some way using the platform in ways it was not intended. So there are ethical issues at stake here, and not everyone will have the same comfort level as you might.
Search Physical Devices
To some, this is considered the ultimate breach of trust, but it is an option if you feel like you’re at your last straw.
Basically, it’s as easy as checking out their phone and seeing if it has numerous dating apps installed on it. All it takes is a cursory glance at a few of them to determine if someone is cheating, especially if there is evidence of hardcore usage of the app on the device.
However, if you’ve come to this particular solution out of desperation, you should probably ask yourself if the relationship is worth saving in the first place.
Find Out If Someone You Know Has a Dating Profile
Conducting a thorough search for someone’s dating profile can be quite time-consuming. You might end up with nothing more than a handful of loose ends with not much to show for your endeavor.
There is some good news here, though. By using an online reverse search engine, you can cut down this sleuthing process considerably. It can help to mitigate any inaccurate assumptions that you might have made during an old-fashioned search since it relies on the most recent data when it conducts its magic.
