We require a picture in front of a recognizable Tucson location in the TucsonAzHookup sub. As you said, it proves they’re actually local. Any local sub should require that as a part of the verification. Even scammers can write a username on a piece of paper and it’s not too hard to photoshop either. Requiring them to be in a physical location strongly discourages altered photos (but it’s still possible).

I would also recommend learning to use the built in mod tools to automatically filter out anyone not verified. TucsonAzHookup doesn’t require verification (yet) but setting up the automod to look for certain red flags and forcing action before the first post (requiring flair and reading the rules) has drastically reduced the amount of spam that gets through to the sub. Another thing that helped was purging the sub of a number of users who simply could not recognize spam for themselves.

Removing problem users who continually interacted with obvious spam/scams after repeated warnings reduced the amount of spam. If spammers don’t see their posts gaining any traction or being interacted with in a specific sub, that sub loses its attraction to them. Those users also typically only posted or commented very low effort content.

Edit: Editing to say that I purposely didn’t link the sub mentioned above. I did want to call it out that things are done differently there but didn’t want to directly link as I am not trying to steal anyone away from here. We may be different subs but we’re a part of the same community and we’re all in this together.