Our editorial staff evaluates products and services independently, but Best Review Guide may earn money when you click on links. Read our advertising disclosure.
PROS:
CONS:
Social Catfish is a people-finding product that allows you to search for people by their name, email address, phone number, or social media handle. With Social Catfish, you can find out if someone is who they say they are and find out as much information available online, all with their easy-to-use service. Their reverse image search provides a feature that no other people-finding product currently offers.
Who is Social Catfish?
Social Catfish is a company founded in 2015 and is based in the state of California in the USA. The company was founded to help people avoid being scammed online and get to know as much information on people as possible. This can help people in many ways, from dating to business deals, knowing the person you are talking to is actually the real person they are saying they are can save you time, frustration, and money. Their website states that the product is “designed to help you find information about people you’ve met online.” It promises to be a “powerful tool” to help you “avoid being scammed or catfished.”
So how does Social Catfish work? Once you enter a person’s information into the search bar, the product uses “advanced web crawlers” to scour the internet for any matching information.
How does social catfish work?
Before we get into the how-to's when using the product, we will want to look at the information source. Social Catfish works by searching the internet for information about a person. It looks for public records, such as birth and death certificates and court and property records. It also searches social media sites and online directories and aggregates the data into its database. Once this data is collected, their system will combine it and provide it to users in an easy-to-read report on the person you are looking for, as long as they have public-facing information online.
Social Catfish has a monthly subscription billing system with multiple tiers, which are as follows:
$27.48, which includes:
Name, phone numbers, emails, and username search access
History of your searches
Easy cancellation policy
Access to the private FaceBook group
$26.99
Unlimited image searches
No access to any of the other search options
Now that we know how Social Catfish works, let's get into the product itself. We were provided a full license key by Social Catfish to take a look at all their features and all their reports. So we will break down each of the different features that they offer.
The first thing you will notice when you log in is that there is a lot of color in this application. Typically, brands will pick their branded color and offer a muted color to offset it. Generally, we will see Red and Grey or Blue and Black, which are pretty much the only colors and shades used, but with Social Catfish, you will see that they aren't afraid of adding color. We like this as the different tones and colors bring your attention to their different tools. We really appreciated the thought that went into the user interface, and we can confidently say that this is one of the most attractive user interfaces we've seen.
The first thing we did was what we were prompted to do, and that was to use the home page scan. From this search bar at the top of the screen, you can search by simply entering the information you want to search with. The options from this quick search are name, phone number, username, address, and reverse image. Don't worry, as we will break down all these filtering options!
Our first search was via the Name filter, and from our test, we could identify several people with the name we were searching for. But with the additional information provided, we could find the right profile for the person we were looking for. Once we narrowed down the profile we wanted to look at, we all needed to click See Complete Results, and they could provide all the information they had on this person.
The next search that we did was via the username, which again worked pretty well but we did notice that, like the name, it did return a couple of profiles as they do look at different networks that use handles/usernames. This isn't their fault just because unless it is a unique username, there is a low chance that people have the same custom names across every social profile.
The final search we did from the home page search bar was for addresses. While it was easy to access, the one thing that we did notice is that it only accepted USA postal codes. This is something to keep in mind, and does apply to a lot of the data, is that their data sources seem to have a lot of USA sources and a bit less internationally.
From the results screen for the people search results, there was an additional report available: the criminal record check. This will go through court records to try to match the person up with any possible court cases that they were charged in.
We found one additional search interesting with Social Catfish that we haven't seen in many other options: their reverse image search. All you have to do is upload an image, and it will again search through their database to see if there are any matches.
In our testing we found the results were not as complete as competitors with some information about search subjects missing. In some searches we also found that the information was a bit outdated when compared to competitors.
Additional features:
Privacy Lock
Again, this is an additional feature we don't see very often in these types of products, but it is a great value for users. Essentially Social Catfish will monitor the Dark Web to see if any of your information is released on it. For those unfamiliar with the Dark Web, it is essentially a place with a lot fewer regulations that criminals often frequent. You need a specific tool to access it so it isn't something that someone would randomly end up on while surfing the internet.
Basically, you probably don't need to be there and don't want any of your info on there. This is why it's a good feature to have access to, as they will scan the Dark Web to see if any of your data was released in breaches or hacks. You get access to this feature for free with your subscription, and we think it is a great aspect of the product.
Search Specialists
Social Catfish also offers a service where you can get help via one of their Search Specialists to help find more information. This is a service that is offered for a one-time fee of $397.00, and basically, you give them all the information you have, and they will go out and work on your behalf to find out more information. This would be similar to hiring your private investigator, but one specializing in finding information about people online.
Unclaimed Money
This is a search tool that you can use to locate money that is yours, even if you don't know it is. It could be money from a closed bank account they couldn't send back for some reason or funds that the government owes and couldn't get into your account. You get access to this great feature because who doesn't like free money?
You can contact the support team via your account once you log in at https://socialcatfish.com/contact via email or phone.
Our editorial staff evaluates products and services independently, but Best Review Guide may earn money when you click on links. Read our advertising disclosure.
By: Mitch | Last updated February 18, 2023 
