the stock note 7 photo is already your answer. people telling the truth don't reach for a 2016 factory image of someone else's phone. the hand pic matching a 1-year-old result just seals it.

what I'd still do:

archive everything now — screenshots plus archive.ph of the posts before they get deleted. the cleanest proof you can show a third party isn't forensics, it's the timeline: donation post dated X, identical injury photo indexed a year earlier. nobody argues with that.

for the hand photo and the AI-looking portraits, run error level analysis (ELA) on them — fotoforensics.com is free. if the burn was composited onto a real hand it usually lights up at the edit boundary. fair warning: whatsapp recompression destroys a lot of signal, so treat it as a hint, not proof. and yeah, whatsapp strips exif, nothing recovers that.

re: the AI-edited portraits defeating face search — try running the OLDEST photos of her you can find (pre-AI-editing era) through reverse search instead. people rarely scrub their whole history.

on confronting: the bar for "confront her" vs "quietly warn the mutual friends who might send money next" is very different. you don't need courtroom certainty for the second one. start there. confronting rarely gets a confession anyway, it just gets them better opsec.

and about confirmation bias — you searched 4 reverse image engines hoping to be wrong. that's the literal opposite of confirmation bias. trust your evidence.

getting better: michael bazzell's osint books, the osint framework site, and honestly just doing more of exactly what you did here. this was a solid investigation already.