Facebook Fake Profiles – How To Effectively Report Them

Reporting Fake Profiles & Scammers to Facebook Matters – Every Time!

Facebook, or any of the Meta platforms such as Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp are full of fake profiles and scammers. But it is essential to report these criminals or another ever gets done.

Don’t let yourself believe that Facebook never removes or deletes these fake profiles – they do, but it takes more than a single report to do it. That is for your protection, if anyone could report a profile and have it deleted, then no one would have a profile. We will explain more below.

PLEASE NOTE: We are not Facebook Support, and you may have to go into the Facebook Help system if Facebook’s process changes, but this will give you an overview of what to do and why to do it.

According to Facebook – Reporting Fake Profiles

A fake profile is a profile where someone is pretending to be something or someone that doesn’t exist. Fake profiles can include profiles for fake or made up people, pets, celebrities or organizations.

How to Report Fake Profiles from Your Laptop or Computer

• Go to the fake profile.
• If you can’t find it, try searching for the name used on the profile or asking your friends if they can send you a link to it.
• Click […] (three dots) under the cover photo and select Find Support or Report Profile. (These menu choices can change at any time, but there will be something similar.)
• Follow the on-screen instructions for fake profiles to file a report.
• If a profile is pretending to be you or someone you know, you can learn how to report it for impersonation.

How to Report Fake Profiles from Your iPhone – Facebook App

• Go to the fake profile.
• If you can’t find it, try searching for the name used on the profile or asking your friends if they can send you a link to it.
• Tap […] (three dots) below the cover photo and select Find Support or Report Profile. (These menu choices can change at any time, but there will be something similar.)
• Follow the on-screen instructions for fake profiles to file a report.
• If a profile is pretending to be you or someone you know, you can learn how to report it for impersonation.

How to Report Fake Profiles from Your Android Phone – Facebook App

• Go to the fake profile.
• If you can’t find it, try searching for the name used on the profile or asking your friends if they can send you a link to it.
• Tap […] (three dots) below the cover photo and select Find Support or Report Profile. (These menu choices can change at any time, but there will be something similar.)
• Follow the on-screen instructions for fake profiles to file a report.
• If a profile is pretending to be you or someone you know, you can learn how to report it for impersonation.

How to Report a Facebook Fake Profile/Account or Page that’s Pretending to be You or Someone Else

Profiles and Pages that impersonate other people go against our Community Standards and aren’t allowed on Facebook.

If you see a profile or Page that’s pretending to be you, someone you know, or a public figure (example: celebrity, politician), we encourage you to let us know. You can report potentially impersonating profiles or pages to us even if you don’t have a Facebook account.

Report a profile or Page:

• Go to the impersonating profile or Page.
• If you can’t find it, try searching for the name used on the profile or Page or asking your friends if they can send you a link to it.
• Click […] (three dots) below the cover photo.
• If you’re reporting a Page, select Find Support or Report Page. If you’re reporting a profile, select Find Support or Report profile. (These menu choices can change at any time, but there will be something similar.)
• Follow the on-screen instructions for impersonation to file a report.
• You can also report impersonating profiles or pages in Messenger.

What Reporting Options to Choose for Fake Profiles

Once you select to report a fake profile you will see the options:

Report

Please select a problem

• Pretending to be someone – DO NOT SELECT THIS UNLESS IT IS A CELEBRTY
• Fake Account – USE THIS
• Fake Name – if this is impersonating someone or has a clearly fake name also USE THIS

There are more options but these are the only ones that matter to you

How it All Works

You must understand that it takes several reports before Facebook will take any action. This is designed to protect everyone from haters and trolls reporting their profiles. This is a safety measure that we should all be grateful for.

Also, do not report a profile more than once. If you report a profile over and over you run the risk of being flagged by Facebook, and this can lead to Facebook restricting your ability to report or other limitations – what is often called being put in ‘Facebook Jail.’

The number of times a profile has to be reported depends on a few factors:

1. The reporting reputation of the person doing the reporting. Facebook internally has something like a credit score for each user. If they find your reporting accurate over time – meaning that they did remove profiles that you reported – then you will have more power and the profiles will be removed with fewer reports.
2. It typically takes between 10 to 30 reports to have a profile effectively removed. Reporting Fake Names can be more effective because, after a few reports, they will require the account to prove its identity. If they fail to provide an ID the profile will be removed automatically.
3. Make sure that you also BLOCK the profile after reporting it. This is an additional clue to Facebook that something is wrong with the fake profile.

That’s really all there is to it.

Facebook is not going to take a profile down with one or two reports. But it does not mean that they do nothing! In fact, Facebook deletes approximately 2 billion profiles a year!

Did You Know?

Did you know that when you BLOCK a fake profile and that profile is also reported as FAKE, Facebook uses the number of blocks as one for the criteria to decide to remove it?

Fake profiles and abusive profiles tend to have many more blocks against them than normal profiles.

Facebook will use this and many other criteria to help them decide to take action.

This is one of the reasons why blocking scammers and fake profiles is important in the reporting and removal process.

Facebook Fake Profile Reporting Tip

If you report a profile to Facebook and the reply that it did not violate the Community Standards, remember you can try again (unless you blocked t of course!)

The main ways to report a fake or scammer profile are:

• FAKE – this does not always work since it depends on FB to recognize the obvious – something they are bad at
• FAKE NAME – this should trigger an identification request – taking the profile down until verified
• HATE SPEECH – this will only work if there are hostile or racist posts or comments on the profile
• HARASSMENT – this only works if you are a friend of the person mentioned.

Sadly Facebook does not provide enough types of reports to properly deal with these people, but we all have to do all we can. But the benefit of reporting again is that the decision was originally made by an algorithm, and if you report again it may go to a human who will also know that there have been previous reports.

How To Report An Underage Facebook Profile

Before you begin, copy the URL of the profile into your clipboard – you will need it for this process

You will also need the FULL name of the child from the profile

This is a difficult process since you will need to manually copy and paste the above information. You may want to open the profile twice on two different tabs for this.

• On the profile go to GIVER FEEDBACK / REPORT
• Select the “SOMETHING ELSE” option
• “Report an Underage Account”
• Paste in the URL or the profile, the full name of the child, and report the age – if unsure say “12” – the law requires parental permission for children under the age of 13 to have accounts online.

Learn More About Reporting

To learn more about how to report these crimes visit reporting.AgainstScams.org