How To Spot A Fake Profile

When moderating a group, it can be difficult to know how to spot a fake a account if you don’t know what to look for. Over the years I’ve picked up a few tricks to spotting fake accounts and hopefully this will help you in the future. There isn’t a lot to look for and taking a few minutes to check a person’s profile may save you a lot of hassle later on.

When responding to someone requesting to join your group the first thing you should look at is when did they join Facebook; if it was fairly recently that’s one red flag.

Next, look to see if the person is a member of any other groups, if they are then scroll your mouse over the number of groups and read the names that come up. If you see strange names or a lot of marketing pages, then that’s red flag number two.

Then click on their name and look at their profile. IF it’s a real person then you’ll see a few pictures of friends or family and so forth. Even if a person has their profile on private a few pictures will still show up in their featured photos on the left side of the profile.

Your next step is to scroll down their wall and see what comes up. Again, a real person will have real pictures and real friends listed. Look at the picture below of the screenshot I took of a fake account. For one thing there are only two pictures, a profile pic and the picture they used as their background or header.

Look at the number of friends they have. Is it a lot or just a few? In this example I’ve circled their names, they all look foreign. Now that’s not a big deal but if the person is trying to join a group for an American Icon singer and all of their friends are foreign, and the person is very young then how did they find out the icon?

All of the steps I’ve just listed are fast and easy ways to spot a fake account and I hope that this information helps in the future.

~ Peggy Sue