Have you ever wondered if somebody is faking their location on their iPhone? Maybe you have a friend whose location always shows that they’re in different parts of the world but you don’t believe it’s real and you want to know for sure. Here you’ll learn a couple of different ways that you can use to find out if someone’s location is legit or if it is being faked. Hopefully, this helps.
Can You Tell If Someone Is Faking Their Location on iPhone?
No. Unfortunately, there isn’t really any foolproof way to directly check if someone is spoofing the location of their iPhone. You may be thinking that there has to at least be some sort of way to have an educated guess on whether or not someone’s location information is real or not. Well, yes, there are some ways that may help you guess whether someone is faking their location on iPhone.
How to Tell If Someone Is Faking Their Location on iPhone
Here we’ll be talking about three possible ways that you might be able to tell if someone is faking their location on their iPhone. These methods won’t necessarily be sure shot ways for you to have one hundred percent certainty of someone’s location but, they are definitely your best bet to get as close to sure as possible with the limited information that you have access to.
1. Check How Their Location Is Changing
One of the ways that you may be able to tell if your friend is using a false location is through iMessages if they have location sharing enabled and also have their iPhone location services enabled at the same time.
If your friend has enabled sharing location to you on iMessage, you’ll be able to check where they are whenever they send you a text with their iPhone. You can look at their location and see if it’s changing over time or if it’s always stuck in the same spot. When a person goes out and they’re moving around, their location should be moving around with them. So if your friend’s location is constantly showing that they are in the same spot without moving, then this may be a sign that they are using an app to fake their location.
It’s very unlikely that a person will be in the same place every single time you talk to them so keep this in mind. If you see that your friend’s location is never changing no matter how much time has passed since the last time you checked where they were, then they’re definitely using some sort of app to hide their current location.
2. If You Have Access to Their Device
If you have kids and you want to keep track of where they are then it’s very important to have access to their location. Since they are your kids, you have access to their device so you can always check it to make sure that they have their location services turned on. You can also check to see if they downloaded any apps to help them spoof their GPS location from you.
Sometimes the app might not be on any of the iPhone home screens, so you will have to check in the “App Library”. Your kids might delete the shortcut of the app because they don’t want you to find it on their phone but, you’ll still be able to find it in the “App Library” if they’re using a location faking app.
You may also want to check your children’s computers because they might not be using their phones to fake their location, they may be using their computers instead. You can look through their “Downloads” folder to check if they have any third-party programs that they recently installed to trick you by faking their GPS location.
3. Talk to the Person
Possibly the simplest way to find out if someone is faking their location is by just talking to the person. If you really want to find out if they are where they say they are, you could ask them about where they are and see if they make any mistakes in the details.
If the person you’re talking to has their location set to show that they’re at the local pool when they’re really not, you could ask them what lifeguard is on duty for the day. Since they aren’t really at the pool, they won’t be able to tell you. Another way you could tell by talking to them is by checking the location that shows up in their messages and then asking them where they are at the moment and seeing if what they tell you matches.
If you’re talking with your friend who shares a location with you on Find My while they are outside and moving around, you can check their location to see if it’s also moving. If you know for a fact that your friend is in their car driving somewhere then their GPS coordinates should be changing every couple of seconds or every couple of minutes at most. You can check Find My every couple of minutes to make sure that this is what is happening or if their iPhone is just showing them being stuck in the same exact spot the whole time. Your friend’s GPS on their iPhone should be constantly updating to keep up with their normal movement. So, if you see that nothing is changing when you go to check Find My, then that is a sure sign that your friend is hiding their location from you.
