How to spot a fake on VKontakte and other social networks. networks?

Hello, friends! We all know that there are many fake accounts on the VK social network: some are created for earning money, some for personal reasons, and some for the purpose of deception. Today I will tell you how to recognize a fake VKontakte account so as not to fall for scammers.

What you should pay attention to:

• Avatar and photos;
• Page age;
• Wall;
• Friends and subscribers;
• Video recordings.

And now about everything in more detail.

Avatar and photos

Usually, a photo that arouses interest . If it’s a girl, then in a swimsuit, with a good figure, with emotions on her face: a smile, a laugh. If the man is either a beefy handsome guy or a “respectable entrepreneur” in a suit. Seeing a friend invitation from such a person, you will definitely go to his page, out of curiosity, see who it is.

There are few photographs in the albums:

If there are a lot of photos, then there are no friends in them, mostly these are pictures from the Internet, demotivators or beautiful photographs, and they were added in a short period of time.

There is another option to check the photo for fake VK through Google images. To do this, right-click on the photo and copy the url of the image.

To do this, go to Google images:

Click search by image:

And we get a bunch of accounts with the same photo:

Several more fake accounts were immediately identified.

The fight against fakes is underway

The presence of fake profiles is a problem not only for the creators of social networks, but for all users.

Therefore, the fight against them must be waged by everyone together.

The development team uses its own methods to identify fakes aimed at committing illegal actions.

All social network users have the opportunity to report suspicious pages.

If a certain account receives numerous complaints, it will most likely be blocked later.

And this will be correct, because at the moment this is the best way to protect yourself from scammers.

Page age

When registering, each page is given an id number. With it you can understand how long ago the account was created.

It happens that the address is hidden:

No problem. Go to the list of the user's friends and look at the id there:

In the second example, we get id = 277,822,076. Next, you can find out the approximate age of the page: if id = 100,000,000, this indicates that it was created in 2010. 190,000,000 - in 2012. In our case, id = 277,822,076 was created quite recently. This is the first call that you should pay attention to when checking for fake pages on VK.

Careful camouflage

Along with all its advantages, social networks are fraught with several dangers.

One of the main ones is the ability for the user to decide what information about himself to provide.

And if initially people completely filled out questionnaires so that friends and relatives could find them, now the phenomenon of so-called fake accounts is actively flourishing.

Wikipedia and the Internet do not provide a clear definition of this term, so it is worth trying to derive it yourself.

So, a fake account, or fake for short, is a user profile that contains false information about the owner or does not contain it at all.

Creating fake profiles is very popular among teenagers.

Often, a teenager has not one, but several pages on a social network - one real one, and several false ones, where they also follow the news and read public pages.

To exaggerate too much, a fake page can be any active but unfilled profile on a forum, pages not on social networks, and empty but active accounts on websites.

However, in this case, the term applies only to social networks, and not to local sites and chats.

Why are they created?

But it’s not just teenagers who create false pages.

The reasons for registering such profiles can be very different:

1. They can be registered, for example, by companies to communicate with clients.
2. Famous artists create a working account to communicate with concert agencies, sound engineers and studios.
3. False accounts are now being actively created to promote any products on social networks.
4. Employees of large companies, so as not to limit themselves in subscriptions, vocabulary and communication.
5. For storing information: music, images, videos. This is done so as not to clog the main account.
6. To temporarily limit your social circle. For example, some people isolate themselves from social contacts and temporarily go to fake pages so as not to fall out of the information flow.
7. Creating your own image within the network usually goes hand in hand with hiding real information about yourself.

What is the danger of such profiles?

The fact is that attackers can also create an account with false information and use it to carry out any activity on the network.

A seemingly empty profile can be used for drug trafficking, prostitution and other illegal activities.

In addition, fakes can be created in order to find out certain information from other people without revealing their identity, or for entertainment and trolling.

Therefore, you should be wary of such profiles and clearly understand that the person on the other side of the monitor may not be who he says he is .

User's wall

Next, look at the notes on the wall. Here is an example of a 100% fake created to make money from advertising:

It happens that a fake was created for other purposes and there are no advertising materials on the wall. Here we look at the following, which may cause suspicion:

• The number of posts on the wall (usually there are few);
• Almost nothing but reposts from other groups. There are no entries of your own;
• There is no activity of friends: likes, comments and reposts;

Why do fakes appear?

Although the word fake is associated with something false, not every such account seeks to deceive people. Moreover, real scammers very often use completely blank pages, which cannot be properly classified as either fake or genuine.

Most often, people create such accounts for themselves for one of the following reasons:

• They don’t want to demonstrate their life, any facts about themselves. Either they are protective of personal information or they simply want to remain anonymous.
• Blank pages with dubious photos allow you to be online without communicating with anyone. However, the desire to “relax” is usually false, since the fact of being online can easily be hidden by other means.
• Another reason is the opposite - with such accounts a person can imagine himself as anyone, thereby making a wide variety of acquaintances.

Finally, if someone tries to pass off their page as the profile of a star, then they simply want to attract attention in this way. As mentioned above, today this practically does not work.

List of friends and subscribers

Next, look at the list of friends. For fake accounts it often looks like this:

Sometimes fakes monitor their accounts and delete blocked users. Here you can go through his friends, if you come across a lot of advertising accounts, pay attention to this.

Pay attention to the number of subscribers.

If a person has a lot of followers, he is not necessarily a fake, but you will not receive any benefit or communication from him. Over time, he will simply unfriend you and you will become another subscriber. Why do they do this , you ask - the more subscribers a page has, the higher it ranks in the search for a contact.

How to spot a fake VKontakte

Method 1. Always remember that anyone on the Internet can turn out to be a fake. Even if your girlfriend or friend is added as a friend, a stranger can easily end up behind their photos, so the first rule is to make sure that your acquaintance on VK is your real acquaintance.

This can be done in three ways. Or call a friend (or girlfriend) and ask if he has now been added to your friend list. The second way, if you do not maintain contact by phone at all, you can contact via Skype. The third way is to find out some points that only you and this person can know about. For example, you once met a person in a certain place (or did not meet). You can write:

• “Do you remember, you and I were on the embankment, taking pictures at the monument?”

If you get a vague answer like:

• "I don't remember" or
• “Yes, I don’t remember that”,

keep finding out. If you get negative results from 2-3 questions, then it is a fake. However, it may turn out that the fake knows some details about the person she introduces herself to or, for example, communicated with him (for example, the ex-girlfriend of your boyfriend or husband). Such a fake may begin to remind you of some details that are convenient for him to remember and this may confuse you. Therefore, in this case, we use the second method of identifying a fake VKontakte.

Method 2. Please send a photo for confirmation.

For example, you could say:

• “Please send me a photo of you, where you are holding your pillow or some toy in your hand.”.

Today, every person has a smartphone, so in the era of selfie fashion, this is very easy to do. This way you will determine that a real person is communicating with you. However, remember that even if a person sends you a real photo, his intentions for communicating with you may not yet be completely truthful.

Perhaps he is pursuing the goal of deceiving you for money or selling you some kind of product. For example, you may be chatting with a girl who will eventually ask you to send you money for tickets to come visit you. And her place of residence may be far outside your country.

Therefore, if you send her money, you won’t even be able to return it. Or the purpose of such a fake will be for you to order a gift for her in an online store. In the end, you buy, send, and the goal is simply to make a deal in your online store. Therefore, we move to the third method of calculating a fake.

Method 3. Fake people who want to trick you into buying something don’t like to spend a lot of time on one person. Therefore, you should always take your time and try to communicate for a long time.

A fake may try to process 1-2 of your “NOs,” but he won’t do it 20 times. Moreover, each of your refusals will somehow imperceptibly reduce communication to separation.

There may be psychological manipulations such as “If you don’t buy me this, I won’t communicate with you anymore (all this can be spiced up with virtual tears).” Let's talk about another way to identify a fake VKontakte .

Method 4. Check your friends. A fake may have many friends, or he may have few friends. Among his friends there may be fakes of the same fake.

Therefore, it is necessary to act carefully here. What tactics work here? Choose those friends who are online at the same time with the one who communicates with you, whom you want to check. Thus, if your interlocutor has fakes, then he cannot be online from everyone at the same time. Therefore, if he is online, then those who are his friends are also online, probably different people. That's what you need. We randomly select 10 people and write them a question:

• “Do you know my interlocutor (Name), and how - in real life, through work, through study, or is he also your friend virtually and you have never seen him?”

Method 5. You can also identify a fake by the date of upload of his photos and posts on the wall. If a large volume of images and notes on the wall were made within one day (most often this is the case), then it is 95% fake.

Why not 100%. Because there is a small probability that this is the second page of a person that he created, since the first one was hacked or blocked. Therefore, even if everything is loaded in one day, you need to check by asking the person to send their photo with a confirmation photo, as described in point No. 2.

Popular article: My VKontakte page: settings, tricks, secrets

Method 6. If an unknown person is added to you, then you can determine whether he is real by the uniqueness of his photographs. To do this, copy his photos to your computer and use the free Tineye image uniqueness determination service.

If this service only shows you his VK page, then there is a possibility that this is a unique person. However, the fake may be the most cunning and mirror the stolen photos before uploading the images. Therefore, you can experiment here too.

Method 7. Find out details about the city. As a rule, a fake does not always live in the city that he indicated in his profile. Therefore, you can ask him about the subtleties that are known only to residents of your city. You can ask his opinion about the restoration of a building that everyone knows. You can ask him about the weather that is currently outside your window. Or even vice versa. You can write:

• “it’s raining now” (but, for example, it’s not),
• "Do you like rain?"

If he writes that

• "no" rather than
• “What rain? It is not raining now!" .

Then you will find out whether the person lives in the same city with you or not.

Method 8. Use intuition. Also remember that you can intuitively feel that the person is communicating in a strange way.

For example, intermittent communication with long pauses and then sudden responses. This means that the person does not regard you as the only interlocutor at the moment and at the same time communicates with others.

And he answers you time after time. Or you feel sudden changes: either the person communicates actively, like a close friend, then suddenly he changes his mood and does not answer you, and this is constantly repeated. You may also accidentally receive off-topic letters from him, and he writes to you:

• “Oh, sorry, this is not for you.”

By the way, extremely useful information on the topic: 10 ways to make money on VKontakte in groups

These are, perhaps, the main ways to spot a fake VKontakte. Do not forget that in the process of communication some new way of definition may come to your mind, so use that too. Here a lot depends on the specific situation and manner of communication. For example, if there is a man sitting on the other side of the fake, and you are communicating with a woman or girl, then you may notice a certain rough handwriting, as if characteristic of the man’s behavior. Or a male fake can sometimes be misspelled and written from a male person, then corrected with emphasis on this, like:

• “Oh, there was a typo.”

Videos

There are two options here: there are few videos and there are many videos.

If there are none or very few, fakes rarely bother with this section. If there are a lot of them, look at what kind of video it is, could one person be interested in the topics covered in the video? There are fakes that specifically add popular videos so that there are transitions to them. Most often these are some high-profile events (politics, incidents), entertainment programs (Comedy club), erotica - what is most often sought in contact.

The fakes have practically no audio recordings—a dozen or two, just for show.

What is a fake?

This phenomenon is the same in all social networks, but it is most widespread on VKontakte. So, what does fake contact mean? It is not difficult to answer this question if we look at the origin of the word. In English there is a term fake, which means “fake” or “false”. In other words, it’s false.

What is a fake VKontakte page? This is a profile of a person that contains false information .

• Previously, many people wrote fictitious first and last names for themselves, and sometimes they simply used some dubious set of letters. Today, it is much more difficult to come across new pages of this kind, since the administration of the social network has begun to monitor this aspect. For the same reason, it has become very difficult to change the name on your profile.
• Often on the fake page there are other people’s photographs, and sometimes there are none at all - only pictures are published.
• Sometimes a person completely copies a famous person, using her first and last name, personal data and photographs.

Often people, armed with information from various sources, create a profile of a real-life star. Fortunately, the VKontakte administration is now monitoring this issue as well. Real pages of famous personalities eventually receive a mark confirming their authenticity.

What does this mean on the Internet and in life?

Today, examples of fakes in real life include iPhones from Chinese manufacturers, medicines and food products, for example, the sale of margarine under the guise of butter. Counterfeit medicines can harm consumer health, just like cosmetics with dubious ingredients.

The most developed fake is on the Internet. This concept also includes fake accounts on various forums and social networks, fake online stores and various websites, photographs, videos and even news.

Fake videos are actively spreading across the Internet, collecting many comments in discussions. A huge number of views brings good profits to the creators of such videos. Unlike counterfeit drugs, these videos are harmless. But phisher sites, the purpose of which is to extract passwords for access to electronic wallets and bank cards, can cause damage to the finances of citizens. Therefore, you should be careful online when reading emails or following links to third-party sites.