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Anyone can create a social media account and there is often no verification done regarding whether the information provided is accurate or real. This makes it ridiculously easy for scammers to create a number of fake profiles to use for nefarious purposes such as Romance Scams and Pig Butchering Scams. We have also previously written about the online market for fake social media accounts.
Profiles on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and dating apps such as Tinder are considered to be personal and representing real people. Scammers exploit this assumption to create profiles for people that don’t exist.
If you ever meet a stranger online professing their love for you or pitching an investment scheme, there’s a good chance that their profile is fake. See if you can spot any of the below warning signs:
Does it look like the profile has been created recently? Signs of this include very few friends, no or few status updates and a single profile picture that has been uploaded recently.
You can look for the earliest post made by the user to get an idea about how long the account has been active.
Real profiles, especially on LinkedIn, will have clear information such as location, education and work experience. If this information is missing or ambiguous, it may signal that the profile is fake.
The username or nickname can be an easy way to identify a fake profile. A strange or foreign-sounding username might suggest that the owner of the profile originally had a different name.
Another obvious indication can be a ‘forex expert’ pitching an investment scheme to you with a username such as ‘forexking12’. This means that the profile has been created for the explicit purpose of pitching a fraudulent scheme.
Fake profiles will usually only have one or two images. The images being blurry or badly cropped could also mean that they have been lifted from a real person’s profile without their consent. Images that look too professional are likely to be stock images.
You can easily check whether the image has been copied by uploading it to Google Images and checking the results. If the same image can be found on multiple websites and is being used by many accounts, it is a clear indication that the image is not original.
The friends/followers list of a user can be a dead giveaway whether the profile is real or fake. If the friends list contains people predominantly from some other part of the world than where the person claims to be from, it is likely that they are pretending to be someone else.
If the friends or followers of the user are accounts with generic or random names, no profile pictures and no posts, it might hint at the possibility that they are bot accounts or users who have been paid to follow the profile.
Real people have many different interests like family, friends, sports and TV. Scammers make a fake social media profile just for one reason; to scam. If the person you are checking out is only talking about “the best ways to invest” or “where to buy the latest gadgets”, he or she may have malicious goals.
If the person claims to be a renowned public figure, they should have a blue checkmark next to their name, indicating that the profile has been verified as belonging to the real-life person. If the verified badge is missing, it cannot be reliably said that the profile belongs to a real public figure.
If, after checking these signs, you feel that the person you are communicating with is not being truthful about their identity, the best course of action is to cease all communications with them. There is almost no possibility that they will admit to using a fake profile.
Further, you can also report the profile as fake to the platform so that it can be reviewed and suspended if necessary.
