Top 7 signs a Facebook account is fake

https://medium.com/@apokerplayer/top-7-signs-a-facebook-account-is-fake-1eb942591887

Zachary Elwood
Nov 11, 2017

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These fake Facebook accounts imitate all kinds of people, including conservatives, liberals, native Americans, and Muslims, and do so for all kinds of reasons; this is not a partisan or politically-one-sided problem.

In this piece, I’ll give some do-it-yourself tips for spotting fake Facebook accounts. The goal of this piece is to make more people realize how extensive this problem is, to get more people to report fake accounts, and to make people more skeptical about online accounts and websites. There’s also the hope that more public concern about this problem will lead to Facebook taking the problem more seriously.

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The tips below are mostly about finding several clues that point toward an account being fake. While there are a few standalone clues that will make it very likely an account is fake (like finding the real person from which they’ve stolen the picture), mostly it’s about putting several clues together that, taken together, make fakeness very likely.

Clue #1: Sharing of low-quality, ad-heavy websites

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Clue #2: Different name in URL

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Clue #3: Content shift or content disconnect

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Clue #4: Lack of content, pics, interactions

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Clue #5: Patterns in profile details

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Clue #6: Use of other people’s photos and names

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Clue #7: Connected to other fake accounts

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Another thing to think about: as we all become more savvy about fake social media accounts, the fake account creators will become more savvy. Many of these fake accounts are only distinguishable as fake accounts because the creators were very sloppy and didn’t really care to hide their tracks; they were going for quantity over quality. I’ve spent a good amount of time outing dozens of fake accounts in Facebook groups, and over the last few months I’ve already seen an improvement in fake account strategy/appearance. There are several accounts I suspect are fake but I cannot prove it based on the usual methods.