We all know we’re bound to stumble across a fake profile on Facebook eventually.Scammers, spammers, and malware peddlers often setup fake Facebook profiles and send a friend request to anyone and everyone, helping them create a large user base that they can use to spread malicious links that lead to survey scams, bogus videos, drive-by-downloads or whatever other dirty tricks they pull out of their virtual sleeve.
Knowing this, Facebook users should be cautious when accepting friend requests from an unfamiliar face.
But what if you want to use the social networking site to make new friends? Is there a way for legitimate Facebook users to recognize a fake profile when they see one?
Recently, Barracuda Labs took a close look at 2,884 active Facebook accounts in order to determine how one could go about telling a real Facebook profile apart from a fake.
While it’s no real surprise that the gender of majority of the fake Facebook profiles is set to “female” or that 43% of fake profiles have never updated their status, it may be a bit of a surprise to learn that fake profiles tend to go “tag happy” with their photos and 68% pretend to have attended college.
Check out the rest of their findings in the infographic below:
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