Face search for brands and trust-and-safety teams

What you are up against

Company photos are published to be trusted: the leadership page, the sales team's LinkedIn headshots, the faces in your ads. That trust is exactly what gets borrowed.

• Fake accounts built on staff facesA profile using your founder's or a salesperson's photo contacts customers with fake invoices, exclusive deals or recruitment scams that ask for a fee. Customers blame the company; the employee finds out last.
• Ad creative and testimonials reusedYour campaign photos appear on a reseller's listing, a knock-off store or a content farm, sometimes with your customer testimonials attached to someone else's product. A licence problem for the brand and a privacy problem for the people in the photos.
• Marketplace and seller fraudA seller or buyer profile with a lifted photo, used across several platforms under different names. The same face appearing under three names is the signal; the face search is how you see it.

Reverse image search finds exact copies of a creative; a reverse face search finds the cropped, mirrored and recaptioned versions, and it finds a person's face in photos you never published. Both belong in a trust-and-safety toolkit. Neither identifies anyone, and neither is a background check.

Three workflows

1. The leadership and staff sweep

With their written consent, search the public headshots of the people most likely to be impersonated: founders, executives, anyone whose photo is on the website or signs customer emails. Record where each already appears. Repeat monthly, or when a customer reports a suspicious message. Consent matters: an employee's face is their personal data, and a sweep they did not agree to is a problem rather than a protection. The step-by-step routine is on find where your photos are being used.

2. The creative reuse check

Pick the hero frames from each campaign that show a face clearly and search them a few weeks after launch, then again at the end of the flight. Results show the listings and pages that reused them. Sort by what you can act on: licence breaches (your legal team), platform policy breaches (ad-reporting and marketplace forms), and sites that ignore both (search-engine removal requests). The takedown guide has the routes.

3. The impersonation response

When a customer forwards a message from your CEO that your CEO never sent, capture the account and the message, search the photo it uses, and file the platform's impersonation report with every sibling account the search surfaces. Tell the impersonated person; warn customers from your verified channels; do not reply to the account. The per-platform forms are on how to report a fake profile, and the plan on someone is using your photos on a fake account. On the Business plan we help prepare and send take-down requests for the results you select.

Which plan fits

What a business may not use it for

The restriction that matters most for companies: FaceSearch results may not be used in employment, tenant, credit or insurance decisions, which includes screening candidates, checking a new hire's online presence, vetting contractors and assessing customers for creditworthiness. Those decisions carry legal requirements, in the United States under the Fair Credit Reporting Act and in the EU and UK under data-protection law, that a face search result cannot meet: it is not accurate enough, it gives the person no notice and no way to dispute it, and it would process their biometric data without a lawful basis. Use it to protect your people and your brand from misuse of their faces, and nothing else. Marketplace trust-and-safety checks on seller photos sit in a grey area: fraud prevention is a legitimate purpose, but the check still processes someone else's face, so document the lawful basis, keep it proportionate, and prefer the platform's own verification where it exists.

Rules that apply to you

• Search faces you have consent or clear authority for: your own staff with their agreement, your own creative, a fraudster's profile photo in a fraud matter you are handling. Our acceptable use rules are a condition of every account, including Business.
• No hiring, screening, tenant, credit or insurance use, and no searching of minors. Breaches close the account.
• One account per person. Do not share logins; history contains evidence and other people's faces.
• Keep result lists and screenshots inside the matter they belong to, and delete scans when it closes.
• Report, do not confront. The platform and, where money moved, the police are the route for whoever is behind an account.