There are always going to be people who are intent on being malicious and spreading maleware.
Security research firm Barracuda Labs studied 2,884 active Facebook accounts, looking for key differences between average real user accounts and fake accounts created by hackers and spammers. Check out the results in the infographic below.
Read more of Chris Taylor’s article.
The easiest way to figure out who’s fake online is to cross-reference different sites. Web2.0 seo is built up from multiple sites and fakers almost never take time to build up a real name for themselves, mostly because they do not want to be caught and building up web2.0 requires that your real data be found and indexed on WHOIS.
The majority of fakes that i have come across pretend to be celebrities or models of some kind. Figuring out who is real is the easiest thing in the world. All you have to do is check their other sites for hyperlinks. If the hyperlinks don’t add up then you are dealing with a phony. LinkedIn and Twitter are best to check because they are official sites. Landing pages are next best because you can check the owners through WHOIS. Some fakes have taken to starting up faker twitters, fakebooks, etc. but those are easy to find as well because they never verify on twitter or linkedin.
Increasingly, real internet presences are being built through social media dashboards because it is hard to log into and update so many web2.0 portals. Real profiles are either trying to sell you something and therefore use social media dashboards, or are ordinary people just trying to keep in touch with family and friends so they keep their web2.0 networks small and related to people they know and interact with often. The ‘look at me’ types are the fakers you want to avoid. They will add anyone and do anything for attention. And they are a lot easier to spot than you think they are – generally they do everything to catch your eye whereas most web2.0 people don’t really care if you notice them or not – unless they are trying to sell you something. Then they want you to notice them but immediately they go into a sales pitch of some kind.
Bottom line: if someone is trying hard to get your attention, but they don’t sell you anything, and aren’t verifiably famous for doing anything important – they’re probably fake.
‘It ain’t hard to tell’ – Nas
Thanks for sharing that Dion…good stuff!
The only thing I have to wonder about this – if Facebook knows the number of fake profiles precisely enough to calculate these figures accurately, why hasn’t it shut them down?
That’s a great question!
Thanks for sharing, sometimes the fakes do a real good job, but these are definitely things to watch for.