Fake Personal Facebook Pages

How Do You Recognise a Fake Personal Facebook Page

First understand that there are many ways someone can create and operate a fake Facebook page, and an even greater number of reasons for them being created. Generally speaking, personal pages are created to attract friends while business pages are created to attract Followers and Likes.

Personal Facebook pages
You and I will have created our personal pages to share information; photos and events, to keep in touch with our families and friends. However there are those who will collect that information and use it to steel identities and spread scams. Your information can be used to create similar or identically looking pages where the creator again sends friend requests to your friends and other people. I’ve been amazed at how many time friends just hit the accept button without questioning why a friend has sent a second friend request. Or how often people just click accept friend requests from total strangers without checking them out.

I’ll go into how to check them out in other posts.

The scammers rely on public laziness and gullibility to do their work, so be alert. Do a search on friend requests before accepting them, especially when you think or know you are already connected to that person. You’ll be surprised how often you’ll find sites having been duplicated. If you find one, notify your friend through email, phone or other social media avenues you know they are on. Just this year I’ve saved 2 friends from embarrassment by doing just that.

Someone had duplicated their sites; copied their photos, profiles and avatars and sent friends requests to their contact list. What followed were scam messages. These caused arguments between them and their friends and destroyed some relationships. If you don’t know how to recognise these sites, the same could just as well happen to you.

When you recognise one after having accepted their friend request, you may not get caught by their scam offers, but staying “friends” will them may raise their interest to duplicate your site. I recently warned a large number of friends on a fake Gina Rinehart site only to find the majority have stayed friends with the scammers. I suppose you can’t fight stupidity.

Has your identity been stolen? Try doing a search on your own name and see what comes up. If you find you have been, notify everyone on that sites list of friends and then report the site and have it block and report it to Facebook.

For the protection of your own site, check out the added security that Facebook offers that tells you the moment that someone hacks your site.

My next 2 posts will cover Business Facebook pages and the Gina Rinehart fake site and why all those friends should have recognised it for what it is.

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