Facebook used to be a safe place but not any more. There are so many spammers and scammers that create fake Facebook profile for a number of purposes including spamming, scams, marketing, hacking etc. Some of these profiles are created by people pretending to another person or trying to be anonymous while some of these are auto generated for marketing and spamming purposes. A study find out that most of the fake profiles are female and thus has more chances of acceptance. If you get a new friend request from an unknown person please do check, before accepting the request, whether it is a genuine profile or not. Just because the new profile has mutual friends does not mean that it is a real profile.

How to spot a fake Facebook profile:

Here are few points based on that you can judge whether or not a Facebook profile is genuine. All these traits are not absolute (some of it might be there in a genuine profile as well) but can be used to find out a fake profile:

• Profile with no pictures
• Profile with pornographic pictures
• Profile with different profile pics of different person (A multiple personality case? :P)
• Profile has too many friends (over 1000 is a good sign to be fake)
• Profile with conflicting information (A person born in 90s will not be a PHD for example, normally or one would not attend two colleges in different geographic location at the same time)
• Profile who tags 30 or so friends in one picture
• Profile that has weird status messages
• Profile which has liked dubious/pornographic/hate pages
• Profile which has too many games activity on its timeline (these profiles are of those gamers who spent all of their time playing Farmville, CastleVille or any such crap)

Why fake profiles are created:

As said in the beginning, there are various reasons for the existence of a fake profile. Some of these reasons are following:

• To pretend that the profile belongs to a specific nationality, race or religion. It will send friend request to such people so that it can successfully fool people in a political, religious or other such discussions by pretending to be genuine profile as it has real people in its friend lists.
• To promote a specific product, page or even ideology.
• To spread spam and scam
• To target a specific person using Social Engineering
• To create an identical profile of a person and divulge her/his personal information to harass them
• Some people are just crazy. They like to do nasty stuff. A fake profile gives them anonymity.

How can these fake profile harm you:

These fake profile can harm you in a number of ways.  Some of these are as follows:

• It might be an attempt to social engineer you to get information from you
• Your personal information, photos, videos, activities are at risk as most of the people just accept the friend request and by default the new profile is added to “friends list” which has considerable access to your information
• Your account can be used for other purposes that you do not even know. E.g., your Facebook status can be hacked just like this.
• Some of the Facebook account recovery options involve your friends. For e.g, in case you forgot your password, it can be sent to three of your friends. Such security options are also used for hacking an account.
• It will make you look stupid if such fake profile starts tagging you into embarrassing pictures and links.

I hope this article helps you in recognising a fake profile. Stay alert and stay safe. If you are more concerned about Facebook security then read this article: How to stay safe on Facebook. Cheers