SIFT-based techniques have achieved satisfying performance in detecting copy-move forgery (CMF). Typically, these techniques find the matched regions of an image and re-examine them using a variety of methods to determine whether CMF has occurred or not. However, these techniques have some shortcomings related to how they handle false matches, which usually occur due to image continuity or self-similarity. First, a spatial distance threshold or segmentation-based methods are commonly utilized to handle image continuity. Second, several external methods along with manually created thresholds are utilized to handle image self-similarity. In this paper, we propose a new matching strategy that is resistant to false matches while reducing reliance on external methods and thus avoiding several thresholds. We model the keypoint as a whole region rather than a single point and employ the intersection over union measure to deal with image continuity. To reduce false matches caused by image selfsimilarity, we combine the cross-matching test with a modified distance ratio test. This combination takes into account the ability to detect multiple cloning. Moreover, we utilize a support vector machine to learn the threshold(s) needed to decide if CMF has occurred or not. The proposed methodology is evaluated over three challenging datasets: MICC-F600, Coverage, and MICC-F220. On MICC-F600 dataset, our proposed methodology outperforms other state-of-art techniques and achieves high precision of 99.38%, recall of 97.5%, and 98.42% of F1 score. Additionally, the comparative evaluation using Coverage, and MICC-F220 datasets proved the effectiveness of the proposed methodology to handle a variety of attacks.