Real isn’t safe.
Know Your Pal and the new pre-date etiquette

For about fifteen years, the etiquette of meeting a stranger from the internet ran on a handful of home-made tests. Reverse-search their photos. Ask for a selfie holding something oddly specific. Insist on a video call before the first drink. If they kept dodging, you had your answer. Those tests worked for one reason: faking a face used to be expensive.

01The tells stopped working

That cost has collapsed. Security specialists now say the old red flags, such as clumsy grammar, inconsistent stories or a match who can’t produce a specific photo, no longer mean much, because AI writes fluent messages at scale and generates tailored images on demand.Expert The custom-selfie test in particular is considered dead: an image of anyone, anywhere, holding anything can be produced in seconds.Expert

Even the video call has lost its authority. Live face-swapping and synthetic voices now run on ordinary video platforms, which weakens a call as proof of who is on the other end.Expert US authorities warn that scammers use AI to generate realistic photos, videos and voice messages, and to write emotionally persuasive messages that mimic genuine relationships.Expert

The losses are not small. In the first nine months of 2025, Americans filed 55,604 romance scam reports with the Federal Trade Commission, 22% more than in the same period a year earlier, with reported losses above $1.16 billion.Verified Across all fraud categories, the FTC received about 3 million reports in 2025, with $15.9 billion in reported losses, up from $12 billion the year before.Verified Those are only the people who reported. And the people doing the scamming are increasingly described not as lone chancers but as industrial “fraud factories” running messaging campaigns around the clock.Expert

My background is building data centres, not writing about romance, so I see this as an engineering problem first. When a check becomes cheap to fake, you don’t make the check stricter. You move it somewhere the attacker can’t reach cheaply. For identity, that place is a government document and a live face, checked by someone who isn’t part of the conversation.

02What a Pal Check actually is

Know Your Pal is a simple idea: instead of trying to catch a fake yourself, you send your match a link and ask them to prove they’re real. Here is how it runs, as ProntoID describes it.Company

1. You create the request. Pick what you want confirmed: an age range, that their ID is authentic, and/or that their ID matches a nationality you name. Decide who pays. Then share the one-time link yourself, or have Know Your Pal send it by email or text.
2. Your match sees who’s asking and what for. The invite spells it out, for example “Verify you are 18+”.
3. They consent, or they don’t. Nothing happens without explicit consent. Ignore or decline, and the request simply expires.
4. They verify on ProntoID, not with you. On their phone they scan a government ID and take a selfie. ProntoID says this takes about 90 seconds.
5. You get a result. Verified or Not verified, for exactly the points you asked about.

The nationality check is worth a second look because it shows the design logic. You name a nationality; the system answers true or false. If your match says she grew up in Lisbon and her passport says otherwise, you learn that. What you never learn is what her passport does say.Company

03Two sides of one link

The part I care most about is the asymmetry. The person asking gets a boolean, not a dossier. That matters because the informal alternative is far more invasive: people already search a match’s surname, dig through tagged photos, or ask for an Instagram handle “just to check”. Each of those leaks more than a yes or no ever could.

Toggle between the two sides below. Pick the data points on the asker’s side, then switch to your match’s view and decide whether to consent.

Illustration only. Screens are simplified from ProntoID’s published flow; prices as listed on knowyourpal.com at time of writing.

04What it costs

One-time payments, no subscription. You pay for the number of answers you want back.Company

Either side can pay. That sounds like a billing detail, but it’s social. Paying for your own check before a first date is a small courtesy: here, I’ll go first. Asking your match to pay for the privilege of being doubted can feel like a toll. The product allows both; the etiquette is yours to decide.

05Not just dating

Dating is the obvious case, but the underlying question is broader: is the person behind this screen who they say they are? It comes up any time you’re about to act on trust you haven’t earned in person.

Marketplace deals. Before you give a buyer your home address, or meet a seller in a car park with cash, a Pal Check confirms there’s a real, identifiable person at the other end. Flat viewings and roommates. You can confirm who is coming to see the place, or who you’re about to share a kitchen with. Your own rule. ProntoID pitches it as a green-flag filter: if someone won’t spend 90 seconds on a Pal Check, you don’t meet.Company I understand the appeal of that rule. The next section is about why I don’t think it should be absolute.

06The case against asking

The strongest objections deserve their best version, so here they are.

It kills something. Part of meeting a stranger is the risk. Asking for ID before a coffee turns a date into a background check and starts the relationship on suspicion. A consent-first, yes-or-no design softens this, but it doesn’t remove it. You are still asking someone to prove themselves before you’ll bother to show up.

It filters out people who can’t, not only people who won’t. Not everyone has a current government ID. Some people’s documents don’t match the name or gender they live by. For some, scanning an ID into any system feels like a risk they have good reason not to take. A strict “no check, no date” rule sweeps them out alongside the scammers, and it does so silently.

It trains people to hand over ID on request. This one worries me most, because it’s the attack surface our own success would create. The more normal “please verify” becomes, the better it works as a pretext for phishing. A scammer can send a fake verification link that harvests exactly the documents a real check protects.

The practical defence is simple. A genuine Pal Check runs on Know Your Pal and ProntoID’s own pages, never inside a chat app, and it never sends your document to the person who asked. If a “verification” asks you to photograph your passport and send it to your match, or to pay by gift card or crypto, it isn’t verification.

The first objection the product answers partly. The other two it doesn’t answer at all. They depend on how people use it.

07What “real” doesn’t mean

Here is the limit, stated plainly. A Pal Check confirms that an authentic ID exists and that a live face matched it at the moment of verification. It says nothing about intentions. It doesn’t tell you whether someone is married, kind, or planning to ask you for money in six weeks.

Real people run scams. The fraud operations described above are staffed by real humans, some of them coerced. A person with a genuine passport can still be a liar with a genuine passport. So the ordinary rules still apply after a green tick: meet somewhere public, tell a friend where you’ll be, and never send money to someone you haven’t met in person. That last one is the FTC’s own advice, and verification doesn’t change it.Expert

What a Pal Check removes is one specific, now very common failure: the person you’ve been talking to doesn’t exist, or isn’t who their photos say. Against rendered faces and cloned voices, that’s no longer a trivial thing to rule out. It’s worth doing. It just isn’t everything.

I’ll close on what I can’t settle. I built this, so my bias runs toward thinking 90 seconds is a fair price for knowing a stranger is real. But if proving you exist becomes the polite thing to do before a first drink, then trust between strangers shifts from something you extend to something you’re issued. Maybe that is simply what trust looks like once faces are free. I’m not convinced it’s only a gain, and I don’t think anyone selling the check, including me, is the right person to tell you it is.

08FAQ