Fake accounts

Lately, I've been seeing an uptick in Facebook "likes" for a Page that I manage. Cool, right? Except this Facebook Page is for a defunct music project I had in high school, which has posted exactly once in the last six years. There's no way these are real people.

Facebook doesn't give you links to the profiles, just a notification with the text "FirstName LastName likes PageName". But I can just search the name and find their profiles, matching the profile picture to the thumbnail in the notification. These profiles are usually freshly created in the last day or so.

Looking at their "Liked" pages, a pattern emerges. Besides my page, there's an abandoned-for-five-years page for a high school robotics team near my hometown. A page for the band program of a local middle school. Other niche local pages for school clubs, often without a single post in years. It seems like these are copied from a combination of a few real people's actual page likes. Creepy.

The profiles are all generic-ish American women, often with a middle initial in their name. Many claim to be employed by Major League Baseball teams. Of course, if you Google these names or variations, no results show up.

Some of their photos, when reverse-image-searched, are stock photos or photos of celebrities. But whose photos did they steal for the rest, the seemingly-unique ones? Or were they hallucinated by machine learning a la This Person Does Not Exist?

So now you have a collection of fake Facebook accounts. What's the next step? Commit ad fraud, or sell likes through a click farm? Find some real people to befriend, and offer to sell them sweet discounted Ray-Bans? If you are operating these accounts, please reach out. I'd love to hear from a loyal fan.