Fake Facebook Profiles

February 5th, 2015

If you participate in Facebook groups, you have probably seen requests to join. About half of the people who try to join my group are fake profiles. I block them. But how can I be sure which ones are fake? It's really easy. I look at a number of elements.

Date joined

Fake profiles would probably show up as having joined less than a month ago. Typically, when people create these fake profiles, they'll just join as many groups as they can right away. I assume that they're doing this to scrape content. This brings me to the next point.

Number of groups

Their sole purpose is to join as many groups as possible, so on their profile you'll see at least 10 groups, sometimes more than 100. I only participate in 3 groups and I'm an active Facebook user and community member. This gives you an idea.

Friends

They will typically have zero friends. If they weren't too lazy, then their 10 or fewer friends will be other fake profiles. That's because their account will get suspended if they send friend requests to real people and get flagged for spam.

Photos

They will often have no photos. Otherwise, their photos will be a group photo or one where you don't see their face clearly. I assume that it's because they don't want to be sued for impersonation. In the past, they used photos of pretty girls for obvious reasons, but I've seen a recent decline in this trend.

Feed

These profiles will often have no posts on their feed. Sometimes, they cheat this by sharing a few articles. It's easy to spot because you'll never see them write something of their own. You also won't see any likes or comments other than their own. Another way that they fill their feed is by repetitively changing their cover image.

There you go! I hope this helps you spot those fake profiles.

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