All About Fake Facebook Profiles
Barracuda Labs recently did a research on 2884 Facebook profiles to find out the differences in fake and genuine profiles and to see if they can uncover any pattern. The results of this research are presented below in the form of an infographic.
According to Barracuda Networks Chief Research Officer, Paul Judge:
Likes, newsfeeds, and apps have helped lead Facebook to its social network dominance, and now attackers are harnessing those same features to efficiently scale their efforts. These fake profiles and apps give attackers a long-lived path to continuously present malicious links to innocent users.
Also, researchers have shown how friending malicious accounts can lead to account takeover using Facebook’s trusted friend account recovery. We have analyzed thousands of fake accounts to determine features and patterns that distinguish them from real users, and created a feature-based heuristic engine to distinguish real users from fake profiles.
Fake Facebook Profiles, an Indian Perspective
Creating fake female profiles is rampant in India. The interesting thing is most of these profiles are created by social media agencies and freelancers to promote their brands.
Till sometime back Facebook Pages had this feature of allowing fans to send invitations to people in their friend network. These invitations would show up in the receiver’s notifications and hence their email ids connected with the account. So if you sent page invites to your friends, there was no way they could miss these invitation and as per my experience almost 10% of them would invariably like the page, regardless of their interest.
This was a great way of promoting your page without paying for Facebook ads. Just create 100 fake profiles (mostly females to attract more “friends”) and considering they have 4000 friends each (fairly common for fake female profiles), you have a potential reach of 4,00,000 and going by my theory of 10% conversion rate you will have almost 10,000 for your page in no time! And if you have the resources (read “social media coolies” for managing profiles) you can aim hundred thousand fans or even a million through this technique. This technique was so effective that some “agencies” would give you guaranteed fans at the rate of Rs. 5-10 per fan.
Thank God Facebook got smarter and changed! The invite feature no more works for fans but only admins. It can still be abused through fake profiles and it is, but it is not as rampant as it used to be even a year ago.
Based on my research and experience here are some very effective signs of a fake profile:
1. The profile picture is of a very beautiful or sexy female. Most of these are fake, and the picture is the biggest way to trap desperate guys. I have personally seen 1 picture being used in 4-5 profiles (all of them fake). Wouldn’t the real owner of the picture have a genuine profile too? Probably yes. That’s precisely why “the art of detecting fake profile” includes other signs too.
2. The profile has more than 1000 friends. While a few genuine networkers also have more than 1000 friends, it’s common for fake profiles. The reasoning is simple – the profile is a marketing asset for the spammer, so having less than even 1000 friends would be a waste of “valuable asset” because the maximum limit for friends is 5000.
3. Too many “one way” messages (messages from random people, with no reply) on the wall. And even if there replies, it will mostly be general greetings, nothing specific. You may wonder how you will get access to the wall if you are not a friend of the person. Fake profiles owners rarely keep their wall or profile restricted.
4. Too many random photos and apps being shared and tagged to huge number of people. This is generally a cover for real interaction and a sign to victims that the profile is active.
5. No specific conversation happening with people, no personal activities being shared, too many “greetings” in status updates, and too many guys replying to those greetings.
6. But above all the surest sign of a fake profile is an unknown girl sending you a friend request (especially if you are a guy). Guys, let’s get one thing straight, real girls don’t send friend requests to random strangers.
I hope you find this post useful in identifying fake Facebook profiles in future.
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