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


No social network checks the data of page owners. You can write any first and last name, but this is used for fraudulent purposes. In the same VKontakte you can use verification, but it is available only to famous people. Attackers may be hiding behind other pages.

How to spot a fake on VKontakte and other social networks. networks? How to spot a fake on VKontakte and other social networks. networks? There are several effective ways to determine who you are communicating with - a real person or a deceiver. The fact that a lot of photos have been uploaded and a lot of friends have been added does not indicate the reality of the page; you need to be careful.

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.

Why are fakes added as friends?

Sometimes the purpose of a fake is to throw the victim out of psychological balance. Raise an unpleasant topic of conversation and start arguing with her intensely. In this dispute, for example, you may fall into hysterics because you cannot convince your interlocutor to the contrary, citing all sorts of arguments. It's like he's impenetrable. Such tricks are resorted to by various psychos who enjoy when a person loses his temper.

A fake page could be a child's page managed by an adult man. Or a handsome man on VKontakte may turn out to be a young girl. On the other side of the fake there may be a completely unpredictable person with unpredictable final goals. Therefore, in the style of step-by-step instructions, let’s learn how to identify a fake, and even determine who is behind it, who controls it. It’s cool, after all, to bring a person “out into the open” so that he doesn’t even guess. Especially if this is your friend or acquaintance.

However, most often the fake wants you to buy something from him, send money, go to an interesting site and order something there. That is, the fake is mainly interested in money. You may ask: “Why make a fake when you can just write a proposal in your own name.” The fact is that a person cannot make many proposals on his own behalf. The appearance is not suitable, and perhaps also the age. That’s why pages are selected that most often depict other people.

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.

How to detect a fake VKontakte by ID?

Usually fakes do not live long; they are used for cheating and other actions. Therefore, the first thing you should do is look at how long ago the page was created. To do this, just go to the search engine and type “Find out the age of the VK page.” You may need a page number for this (how to find out your VKontakte ID). The information is provided in the following format:

As you can see, the period of use of the verified profile is more than 3 years, it is unlikely to be a fake, although this does happen. If you see that the page was created a week or month ago, it is most likely a scammer. He will deny and say that this is my new page.

Firstly, you can always restore a page using a phone number; this can be done in a few minutes.

Secondly, ask them to write to you from the old account (if there was a page before).

Checking your profile's age helps, but not always. Perhaps someone you know actually just registered on a social network and found you through a friend search. Therefore, it is worth using other methods of checking for fakes.

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;

How to download data that VKontakte knows about you

It is extremely easy to upload all the information that a social network knows about you. To do this, you need to do the following:

  1. Go to vk.com and log in.
  2. Open a special page dedicated to protecting user data and go to the very bottom.
  3. Find the “Request Archive” button and click on it.
  4. In the window that opens, select the data you want to download. They are grouped by category and all are selected by default. The approximate time for preparing the archive is indicated at the bottom of the dialog box. If necessary, generate an OpenPGP key and encrypt the archive with it.
  5. Click on the "Send request" button. At the moment, the function of uploading profile data is in testing mode, so its completion time may take several days.

  6. Confirm your identity by linking your mobile device to your profile and then entering your passcode. This can also be done by entering a key sent via SMS to the phone number linked to your account.

  7. Wait for a message from the VKontakte Administration. Usually it comes instantly.

After the VKontakte Administration sends you a link to download the archive, it will only work if opened from your account within 7 days of receipt (for security reasons).

To download the archive, follow the link from the message from the VKontakte Administration, click on the “Download Archive” button and confirm your identity through the mobile application.

The downloaded data will be available as html files in a ZIP archive and sorted by category.

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 recognize a fake on a social network or how to find out that you are being deceived. Do you have any fakes?

How to recognize whether a page is fake or not on a social network?

In this article I will share my experience of “exposing” left-wing pages on social networks using the example of Vkontakte.

Quite often we deal with fakes. The word fake is already familiar to many, but if you don’t know, then in English (fake) it is a fake.

Instructions on how to expose a fake are located a couple of lines below. One time I received a personal message from a friend and she asked me to repost some nonsense from some girl’s page who supposedly would help her win an iPhone. I went to this page and saw a bunch of reposts and messages that she was giving away iPhones. People are being carried away - they like and repost, she has thousands of people as friends, and on the wall there is a photo of a supposed iPhone warehouse. So it was a fake . How did I know? She fit all three points:

  1. Please note the date the photos were uploaded . For fakes, they are most often uploaded on the same date. There are, of course, exceptions, but basically everything is like that.
  2. Similar to photographs, look at the activity of adding videos, the first posts on the wall . If there are many of them and all on the same date, this is suspicious.
  3. Check the person's photo to see if there is a similar photo on the Internet . Copy the link (or download) and go to the Google image search service. We enter the link (or download it from a computer) and look at the matches. Instructions below
  4. In relation to the VKontakte network, the fake has few or no subscribers.

Let's use a live example, it's more fun and clearer. Somehow this fake was added to my friends list https://vk.com/id54486085

Free thank the author

He did not respond to my message:

Fake people rarely respond to messages or comments to their photos.

Next, we go to the page - we see 500 friends, only 2 subscribers. Most often, such pages are engaged in PR of groups on social networks or other advertising.

We open the photos and see that they were all added on July 28, 2014. Most likely, it was on this day that the fake created this page. His photos will most likely be without friends (after all, the more other people in the photographs of a fake, the greater the chance that the owners of the photo will find the fake).

Next, I will answer the question of how to recognize a fake VKontakte from a photo.

So, how to recognize a fake + in contact

Copy the link to the image (or download it) and paste the link into the Google image search service. Here we click “search by image” and paste the link. The figure below shows the sequence of actions:

I provided a link, but you can also download the image and upload the file to Google. Click “search by image” and look:

And of course we see that the page is not real, but the photo is popular among thieves. It is possible that among these pages there is a real one. She definitely won’t add a bunch of photos on the same day.

If you are concerned that your photo may be used, check your photo on Google in the same way. If you find it, report the page.

These are my methods. If you have anything to add, please share.

It turned out to be very easy to recognize a fake

Share this post with your friends, people should know that they are being deceived by fakes!

In the next article we will find the lies of the media using a live, sensational example.

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.

Reposts and posts on the wall

Usually, if a social network user reposts from a group on his page, it means he liked the post and wants to tell his friends about it. Pay attention to the nature of these entries to better understand the person.

From reposts you can learn about tastes in music, humor or cinema. It’s a simple matter to look at the manner of communication without ever having corresponded in person. It's worth taking a look at the comments this user leaves. Most likely, it will immediately become clear whether he is well-mannered, or vice versa.

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