We open our Facebook session and we see a friend request from a profile with photos of less dubious quality. At best, the person behind this account can be an acquaintance who wants to gossip about our Facebook posts. But there are cases, which I have been able to personally experience, in which the people behind a fake Facebook profile are looking for something more about us. Money? Personal information? Nude photographs? The possibilities are diverse, and this time we will see what is hidden behind these a priori harmless "people" .
He added me a fake Facebook profile with a strange name, who can it be?
There is currently no possible way to know exactly who is behind a certain Facebook account . It is precisely because of this that a multitude of people and organizations of different types decide to create a doubtful profile or of questionable origin, and what better way than to present my case to explain who is behind these types of profiles.
It was a little less than a year ago when I received no less than three requests for friendship from people (women in this case) with names in English and French and with at least suggestive photographs . Knowing that they were false or fake profiles, I decided to accept the request of one of these profiles.
No more than 30 minutes passed and the profile in question decided to start a conversation with me through Facebook Messenger. After a vague exchange of words in a Google Translate Spanish, the person behind the fraudulent account decided to make a video call through Facebook chat without prior notice and repeatedly. After denying the call, I decided to investigate the case for several days and found the key: sextortion. This video from the YouTube channel Sin Filtros explains it perfectly.
In summary, sextortion in its different variants is a type of fraud in which the person in question is forced to pay a certain amount of money to a person or group of people to prevent the sharing of personal material of any kind. sexual or pornographic. This is precisely where the aforementioned video call comes into play. How can they get hold of such material if we haven't shared it? Simple: through video and photo editing methods.
Had he accepted the call, he might have suffered this type of fraud. The way to proceed in this case is quite simple. We will receive an email or a message through the Facebook chat warning us that we will have to pay an amount to a certain account. In the event that we do not agree to do so, all kinds of material manipulated with our faces will be shared on the personal wall of friends and contacts, simulating sexual abuse of minors or complete nudity. What we must do in this case is to go immediately to the nearest Police or Civil Guard headquarters that we have and delete the false profile from our list of friends.
How to tell if a Facebook profile is fake
Luckily, spotting fake profiles on Facebook is extremely easy. The first thing we should look at will be the name and location . Are they from another country or is the name too generic? Then most likely we are faced with a false profile.
Another of the most reliable indications that a Facebook profile is false is the date and quality of its publications . If both the user and the publications are no more than a year old and the statements are in another language or with a “strange” Spanish, surely the profile we are facing is not real.
Finally, photos and images are possibly the best indication to see if a profile is real or not. It is enough to download the image in question and search for it in Google Images by clicking on the Camera button to see if it belongs to a real person or a bank and images such as Pixabay or FreePik.