Connecting with strangers on Facebook and Twitter may
gain you more friends and followers, but it also leaves you vulnerable to
scammers and spammers. Be aware, if you’re tempted to accept a friend request
from a stranger or allow someone to follow you, that around 83 million Facebook
accounts are thought to be fake and many of these are used for nefarious
purposes.
First, check the person’s Facebook profile (if you can) to verify they are who they say
they are. Who are their friends? Where do they live? Have they shared any
content aside from their profile photo? Best of all, try searching for their
profile photo using an image search engine to see if the picture has been
stolen from elsewhere. To do this, save the photo to your Desktop, then go to
TinEye (www.tineye.com) or Google Images (images.google.co.uk) and upload the
picture to search for matches across the web. You can report a fake account to
Facebook by clicking the three-dot icon on its cover photo and choosing Report.
Fake accounts on Twitter can follow you without asking permission and may tweet links to
malicious sites or pester you and your real followers with spam or porn. Many
such accounts have eggs for profile pictures because they haven’t changed
Twitter’s default settings, but others use photos of real people and not all
egg accounts are fakes.
There are several tools that scan your list of followers to determine which profiles aren’t
genuine, but these often charge you to reveal the findings and let you block
the offenders. Fortunately, a helpful chap called Clayton Lambert offers a
couple of free scripts for weeding out fake Twitter followers, called Block
& Remove Fake Twitter Egg Followers and Fake Twitter
Follower Removal Script. Both need to be run using the
Console function in Chrome – you’ll find full instructions on their respective
pages.
You can easily block and report fake
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