Fake Facebook Users Likely to be Popular Bisexual College Women

So you just got a Facebook friend request from a woman you don’t know. Maybe she’s already connected to some of your friends, maybe she isn’t, but she has about 700 friends total. She seldom updates her profile, but tags her photos like crazy. She went to a college relatively close to her high school. She isn’t too interested in entertainment, but she is interested in both men and women.

If that sounds like your dream friend, sorry — it also sounds exactly like the average fake profile set up by malicious users intent on spreading spam and malware once they’ve friended you.

Security research firm Barracuda Labs studied 2,884 active Facebook accounts, looking for key differences between average real user accounts and fake accounts created by hackers and spammers. Check out the results in the infographic below.

Of course, it’s hardly surprising that malicious users are using pictures of cute-looking women (note the fake profile pics in the border) with exotic sexual interests to reel in the unsuspecting. But the other details are likely to raise an eyebrow.

For instance, if the user’s college was 300 miles from their high school rather than 600 miles, that makes them more likely to be fake. We’ve no idea why this should be. Perhaps malware makers think that’s a believable pattern of movement.

The excessive photo-tagging makes some kind of sense — it’s the kind of thing a malicious user can do quickly to make multiple profiles seem active interconnected. Evidently they should be adding more updates and entertainment interests too.

Have you ever friended a fake profile? Time to ‘fess up — in the comments.

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