How to distinguish a fake from a real profile: a guide to digital security
Interacting with a fake account can cost you money, reputation, and peace of mind. Scammers steal millions of dollars every year through fake profiles, while trolls destroy the reputations of companies and individuals. Knowing how to spot a fake isn’t just digital literacy — it’s an essential survival skill online. Let’s learn to filter out fakes.
1. Study the user’s main photo or userpic.
— As a rule, an active user of social networks at least periodically changes their profile picture. If the profile is 2-3 years old or more, and it is actively used (corresponds with other accounts), but there is only one photo, this is suspicious.
— If the userpic does not show a face or uses a photo of a famous person, if the picture is of poor quality or if there is no profile photo at all, all this is a reason to suspect something is wrong.
— Try to upload the suspicious page’s userpic to a search engine. It may turn out that the person’s photos were simply stolen from someone else’s page, and you can find the real account if you compare the dates and activity of the profiles.
2. Explore the page’s photo album.
Fake accounts are usually created in a stream, so they often have all the photos added at once — in one day or even an hour.
3. Review the profile information
Usually, people have information “about themselves” on their social media pages: date of birth, place of work, school, marital status.
— Pay attention to the name and nickname. For example, if you type Brad Pitt into the search, all fake accounts, as a rule, have extra characters (Pittt or Pitt123), additional words (Real Brad Pitt) or incorrect letters (Bred Peat).
— Real public figures or companies have a verification checkbox in all social networks.
— Study when the profile was created, for starters, by the posts on the wall — if the account was only recently created, you will notice it right away. There are also ready-made services for checking the date of account registration.
— Reviewing the posts on a page can also be useful to see if the content has changed in theme. This happens when an account is hacked and the information is changed. It may turn out that a young crypto investor from Dubai posted knitting patterns and photos of his grandchildren three years ago.
4. Look at subscribers.
— Does the account have too many subscribers, but very little content? This is suspicious.
— Do you have mutual friends?
— Check the quality of the page’s friends and subscribers: are they real people or «dead souls» and bots?
— If the account, on the contrary, has more than 5,000 subscriptions, that is, it subscribes to 5,000 friends and, most likely, subscribes to everyone in a row or simply uses a service to boost the audience?
5. Ask a simple question.
— If the page says that the person is from your city, ask directly, for example, what street he lives on. As a rule, if it is a fake page, you will get an inappropriate answer or will not enter into correspondence at all.
— If you suspect that your friend’s page has been hacked by scammers and they are asking you for money or to follow some dubious link, do not rush to fulfill their request right away. First, try to contact your friend in another way.
Important! Each of these factors separately does not provide a full guarantee that you are dealing with a fake, but the more points match, the more you should think about whether it is worth communicating with such an account, and what consequences this may have.
Fighting fakes is like a game of cat and mouse: social networks are introducing new verification algorithms, and fraudsters are coming up with new ways to bypass them. With the advent of neural networks, creating plausible fakes is becoming easier. In such conditions, the main tool for protection is not technology, but the critical thinking of the user himself. The ability to ask questions and find the original source is the new super skill for navigating the digital world.