How to identify a fake Facebook account?

While managing 30+ Facebook group, I need to decide who shall I approve to get into my group. I thought it was an easy job, but I was wrong, the most difficult part is identifying a fake Facebook account, sometimes I feel like an FBI.

To create a clean purpose Facebook group, I blocked nearly 100 Facebook personal account, I would like to share with you how do I identify a fake facebook account.

You could check:

1) Profile photo

• Too beautiful or handsome: sometimes they are too good to be true, please check what kind of friend they have? If their friend is also too beautiful and handsome, mostly they are the fake account. These type of profile normally they don’t have too much cloth on them or over makeup on the face.
• No photo: normally no photo I will ignore them, but it doesn’t mean they are a fake account, it depends when they register the Facebook account, if they register Facebook more than 1 years, most likely not a fake account, because normally age over 50, they don’t use Facebook frequently.
• Bad quality photo: normally fake account get the photo from Google

2) Register time

• Facebook starts in 2004, normally, the personal profile is created after 2008.
• If the profile registered within 1 year, normally I will ignore. If the profile seems real, I will message privately to ask the reason

3) The first public post

• If the post is really related to personal, normally they are real.
• If the first post is an advertising, normally I will ignore in case they just want to promote something.

4) Their friends’ name

• If their friends’ name is very similar, ex. they are all composed of 3 Chinese characters, or always 2 Chinese characters, this is a fake account because most of the Chinese nowadays, they like to use the English name as their profile name.
• If their friends’ name is logical to the country standard, this only can tell by the local people. ex. the surname of a Chinese from Taiwan or Singapore or Hong Kong is written differently.

5) link address

• a normal new Facebook profile link looks like https://facebook.com/100012345678912
• you can personalize a meaningful link https://facebook.com/LaFeniceSG
• fake account link looks like https://facebook.com/uekvaxghojspbayw

6) Answer the question

• Setup a group question to identify if they answer the question.
• Sometimes fake account will answer the question, you need to check the photo still

7) How many followers

• The more followers that the profile has, the more credibility it is.

8) Friends

• Normally fake account has less than 20 friends or nearly 5000 friends.

9) Mutual group

• The more mutual group you have, the more possibility of the interest you’re in common.

If you have any question, please feel free to leave your comment, or discuss with me.

Originally published at http://sofi.lafenice.co on November 23, 2018.