How to Detect Fake Facebook Account?
Fake Facebook profiles have become a cause of serious concern for regular users in the recent years. According to estimates, there are more than 80 million active fake Facebook profiles over what is unarguably one of the world’s most popular social networking site.
That means, nearly 6% of all profiles over this site are fake.
These fake Facebook accounts can be a source of great nuisance. They usually spam the users’ wall with bulk messages and can also become a source of great embarrassment if they choose to put up weird stuff on your wall or use the pics you put up about yourself or your family over adult sites (Now, you can never ever rule out such a possibility)!
Also read: Stay Safe On Facebook- Read Official Facebook Security Guide
Tips to detect fake Facebook profiles
Here are some common features of fake Facebook profiles using which you can try to make out whether the person is question is a genuine real life person whom you might know or is a fake.
1. Fake pictures
If you see a Facebook profile with a profile picture of a celebrity, say Angelina Jolie, or a cartoon character or a pet, take it as a warning sign.
Chances are that this person does not want to reveal his true identity and is probably a fake profile.
2. Single picture
Most fake Facebook profiles have only 1 or 2 photographs. They will put up all sorts of pictures of football matches in and around the city they claim to belong to and put up statuses to give that impression. But they will not have pictures of themselves.
3. Too many friends
Now, people who create fake profiles with malafide intentions of tricking and duping the maximum number of people will have too many people as friends! Many times the number a normal person is likely to have. If, for instance, you get a friend request from someone who puts us a picture of Selena Gomez as his profile picture and has 3722 friends, you have every reason to believe that this is a fake profile.
4. Incomplete and incoherent personal information
For those of you who do not like to blindly accept any request they get, do check out the personal details if you doubt the person in question. Most fake profiles will be SINGLE, and have Public profiles.
How to spot a Fake Facebook profile?
Luckily for us, there are lots of options we have at hand to spot a fake Facebook profile and to avoid it.
1. We begin with the most time trusted formula that has been known to work without fail for all. Hover your mouse over the profile picture of the person whose antecedents you would want to check out before accepting a friend request and right click on it to a place where it would be easy for you to locate it again easily within a few seconds. Your desktop, for instance.
2. As an example, I am using the profile picture of this blog’s owner- Plaban Manna. I just downloaded his Facebook Profile picture and saved it to my Desktop.
3. Go to Google Image Search and drop the recently saved picture from your desktop into the search bar.
4. Here, I dragged Plaban’s picture into the Image search and this is what I get to see:
Now, Plaban, I am extremely sorry for the results you see here. 😉
Since this is a genuine profile, you do not see the same picture being used at half a dozen as a profile picture at dozens of other places as well.
5. Now, let us consider a fake profile. This is someone I suspect of having a fake id on my son’s profile. Here, I saved her profile picture on my desktop.
When I dragged her picture to Google Image search, this is what I see:
Since there are so many matching results I get to see with her image, I have every reason to warn my son that this is a fake id and needs to be unfriended immediately.
6. While it is good to have lots of friends over Facebook (The more, the merrier- as they say), it is not really advisable to friend unknown people. Just because you have a few common interests (skiing or cooking, for example) or a few common friends, that is not reason enough for you to add a person you do not know personally to YOUR list.
7. If you begin to doubt a person’s credentials after having added him/ her or feel that he/she has started spamming your walls, annoying you with unnecessary game requests or tagging you without any rhyme or reason, do not hesitate to ‘unfriend’ him/ her.
Follow these simple steps to spot out a fake Facebook profile, and you will be glad you started taking this simple precaution. Once you identify fake Facebook profile don’t forget to report it.
It is, after all, better to be safe than to be sorry.
If you were able to detect some fake Facebook profiles following the methods and tips listed by us, do let us know. Also write to us if you follow some other tricks for detecting fake Facebook profiles. We would love to share that with our readers!
Author Bio: This post is by Ambika Choudhary Mahajan who blogs on topics related to health, lifestyle, beauty, fashion & social media on her blog: MyMagicMix. Do log in to this site to read: Find Out Who Viewed Your Profile-Best Facebook Profile Tracker Apps.
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Awesome and informative post Really searching pics in google images helps us manytimes to reveal the identity.
Btw The results that appeared when searched with Plaban’s pic were EPIC 😀
Yes, Google gone mad 😀
Hahahaha!!!
A MONKEY ;p
Thanks! Am definitely going to try out the steps mentioned, there are some people in my friendlist I feel the need to check out 🙂
Hi Joyti,
Glad you liked the post. I think you should be careful before accepting friend requests from unknown people.
Busted couple of people while reading this post. 😀
Greattt share Plaban. And Google has gone mad!!! Gave everything at our fingertips, fakers cant hide no more.
Thanks for this share.
i m trying to my facebook account it is showing fake.
Facebook rarely deletes fake profiles, everytime I browse FB and see a fake profile, I report all of them and I would say that only about 10% of those I report actually get removed usually they remove for nudity and occasionally racism, but rarely remove a profile because its fake.
The reporting system is flawed. For example, someone creates a fake profile of a celebrity, you cant report it as impersonating a celebrity unless the celebrity already has a legitimate profile on Facebook because you need a link of the real profile to prove its being impersonated. Since most celebs dont use facebook, they wont have a real profiles on there for you to link as proof, instead you have to report the profile as a ‘fake’ – then click ‘other,’ but Facebook rarely removes profiles when you report them as Fake/other.
I am sorry to say but the article does not focus on all aspects to trace down a fake profile. You have made the post very long when it was not needed. For example, you don’t need to download Plaban?’s pic, save it to your PC and upload it back to Google. The short way is to copy the image URL and paste it in Google image search – simple. The second thing – Google image search doesn’t help. For instance, if you search for my profile picture in Google, you will find many similar pictures on other websites. So this doesn’t mean that fb.me/lalitindoria is a fake account of Lalit Indoria?? So you just wrote about Google image search but there is a lot to focus about. Myself and Pradeep Kumar? have written a lot more about these aspects. Nothing personal, but just a feedback 🙂
Now a days fake accounts are everywhere in Facebook. I think you have explained well especially the way of using Google Images to find out the fake accounts.
There is always FB Checker. It might not be 100% accurate, but at least it’s a good start and it’s free. It will check all photos that you select. Works similar to Google Images but it’s a lot easier and faster because it focuses on Facebook profiles.
searching images is a good idea thanks dude that’s cool