How to Spot a Deepfake Video or Photo

Deepfakes used to be a novelty. Now they're a tool for fraud. Convincing face-swap videos and cloned voices are being used to fake video calls from "your boss," push crypto scams with a celebrity's face, and spread disinformation that looks like real footage. The good news: most fakes still leave tells. The honest caveat: those tells are heuristics, not proof, and they're getting subtler. This guide focuses on deepfake video and face-swaps — for still images made from scratch, see our companion post on whether this photo is AI-generated.

Why deepfakes matter now

The threat isn't abstract. A few real-world patterns show up again and again:

• Fake video calls. Scammers impersonate an executive or a family member on a live call to authorize a payment or "verify" an emergency.
• Investment and celebrity scams. A public figure appears to endorse a platform in a video they never recorded.
• Romance and catfishing. A face-swapped video "proves" someone is who they claim, pushing a victim past their doubts.
• Disinformation. A politician or official appears to say something inflammatory that never happened.

Because a moving face with a matching voice feels so much more trustworthy than a photo, deepfakes lower people's guard exactly when it should be up.

Visual and audio tells

No single sign is conclusive, but look for a cluster of these:

• Blinking and eyes. Blinks that are too rare, too frequent, or oddly timed. Reflections in the eyes that don't match the room.
• Lip-sync drift. Mouth shapes that lag behind or don't fully form the sounds being spoken, especially on hard consonants.
• Face-boundary flicker. Shimmering, blur, or a faint seam where the swapped face meets the jaw, ears, hairline, or neck — often most visible during fast movement.
• Lighting mismatch. The face is lit differently from the background, or shadows on the nose and cheeks fall the wrong way.
• Skin and texture. Waxy, too-smooth skin, teeth that blur into one block, or hair that looks painted at the edges.
• Audio. Flat, over-even intonation, missing breaths, subtle metallic artifacts, or ambient noise that cuts unnaturally.

Slow the video down or step through it frame by frame — many artifacts that the brain smooths over at full speed become obvious at quarter speed.

The live-call trick: ask them to do something

Real-time face-swaps run under tight time pressure, and they break when the model hits something it wasn't trained to handle. On a suspicious live call, politely ask the person to:

• Turn their head fully to one side — sharp profiles often warp or peel the fake away.
• Wave a hand slowly in front of their face — occlusion frequently glitches, with the hand or face smearing.
• Press a finger to their cheek or nose, or hold up a specific number of fingers on request.

A genuine person does this without a hitch. A live deepfake tends to flicker, distort, or lag. This isn't foolproof — the tech keeps improving — but it remains one of the most practical checks available today, and it costs nothing to try.

Why a reverse face search helps

Here's a step deepfake tells miss: whose face is this in the first place? A deepfake is built from real images of a real person, and a scammer often lifts those images from someone's public profile. A reverse face search lets you check the source. Take a clear frame of the face and search for where else it appears online. That answers two useful questions: is this a real, findable person with a consistent history, or does the same face show up on unrelated accounts under different names — a classic sign the image was stolen and reused. This is the same technique that helps spot fake profiles with a face search and catch a catfish with a reverse image search.

Step by step

1. Pause and screenshot. Grab a clear, front-facing frame of the face from the video.
2. Scan for clustered tells. Check blinking, lip-sync, edges, lighting, and audio together — not one in isolation.
3. Test it live if you can. Use the head-turn or hand-wave trick on any real-time call.
4. Search the face. Run the frame through a reverse face search to see where that person actually appears online.
5. Verify through another channel. Call the person back on a known number, or confirm the claim independently before acting.

What to do if you're targeted

If you suspect a deepfake is being used against you or someone else, don't act on the request in the moment — that urgency is the scam. Stop the transaction, hang up, and re-contact the real person through a trusted channel. Save the video, screenshots, and any messages as evidence. Report it to the platform where it appeared and, if money or identity theft is involved, to the relevant authorities. If it's a face made to impersonate someone you know, a face search can help you gather the receipts. Our guide on the signs you're being catfished covers the wider pattern these scams follow.

The bottom line

Deepfakes are convincing but rarely flawless. Watch for a cluster of visual and audio tells, use the live-call trick when you can, and never let a moving face override basic verification. Detectors are unreliable and every tell is a heuristic, not a verdict — so treat what you see as a lead and confirm it independently. When you want to know whether the person in a video is real or a lifted image, start with a free reverse face search on FaceSeek.