Fake page blocking methods
Fakes (English - fake) - fake pages on social networks, created with the aim of deceiving, impersonating another person.
This phenomenon is well known to public people. There are thousands of fake celebrity accounts on any social network posing as the original.
Such accounts are used for various purposes: spam, provocations, libel, creating conflicts, etc. Sometimes they become even more popular than the original ones. There have been cases when fake accounts were quoted in the media as real statements of famous people.
Euronews cites Sergey Lavrov's fake Twitter account - Lenta.ru
A separate type of fakes is the so-called parody accounts. They look like the real pages of the person being ridiculed, but with a distorted name or avatar. Because of this, they do not formally violate the rules of the social network, since they are not fake.
For example, a spoof Twitter account pRESIDENT OF ROISSY has about 2 million subscribers and once surpassed in popularity the authentic account of the President of Russia.
How to protect yourself?
You can try to block fake accounts yourself by contacting support. We work with complex tasks when contacting support is not effective.
To make our applications processed faster, we work directly with the administration of popular resources: Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki, Mail.ru, Twitter.
What we can
- Bulk blocking
Famous people can have a huge number of fakes - dozens or hundreds simultaneously on different social networks. It is inconvenient to block each one individually by contacting the support service.
In this case, we can block all fake accounts at once by submitting the lists to the administration of the social network.
- Continuous monitoring
Tracking new fake accounts and automatic blocking. This allows new fakes to be detected and blocked before they gain popularity.
- If the support service refuses
Sometimes the support service refuses to block a fake page, citing the absence of violations of the site rules. In this case, we will help to collect evidence and resolve the issue in your favor.
Verified accounts
To distinguish real celebrity profiles from fake ones, there are special verified accounts on social media.
Such accounts are marked with an icon, which guarantees that the site administration has checked and the page really belongs to this person.
The rules for obtaining verified status on most social networks are not clearly described. Each case is considered individually. We assist in
Brief theory
In the practice of accounting transactions, a complex discount rate is sometimes used. In these cases, the discounting process slows down, since each time the discount rate is applied not to the original amount (as with a simple discount rate), but to the amount already discounted at the previous time step. Discounting at a complex discount rate is carried out according to the formula:
where is the compound discount rate
It should be noted that discounting at a complex discount rate is more profitable for the debtor than discounting at a simple discount rate, which is used mainly by banks when accounting for promissory notes. The above becomes clear when comparing formulas for discount factors: and; here - simple, - complex discount rate. According to the first formula, the value of the discount factor decreases evenly as it grows and reaches zero at. According to the second, the factor decreases exponentially and reaches zero only in the limit, at.
By analogy with the nominal and effective interest rate, we introduce the concepts of "nominal discount rate" and "effective discount rate". Let's denote the nominal discount rate as. Let the discounting be done not once, but once a year, i.e. every time at the rate. In this case
where is the nominal annual discount rate.
The effective discount rate characterizes the result of discounting for the year. That is, it is in relation to the nominal. It is found from equality:
For the same conditions of operation, the effective discount rate is less than the nominal one.
Compound interest rate escalation is not the only possible method. Sometimes the build-up is achieved using a complex discount rate:
The multiplier of the build-up when using a complex bet is obviously equal.
Problem with solution
The task
Determine the effective discount rate and the discount amount if it is known that a financial instrument in the amount of RUB 5 million, maturing in five years, was sold at a discount at a quarterly discount at a nominal discount rate of 15%.
The solution of the problem
The amount of the discount is determined by the formula:
where is the nominal discount rate
Number of discounted per year
Term in years
The effective discount rate characterizes the result of discounting for the year. It is found by the formula:
Answer:
If you do not need help now, but may need it in the future, then, in order not to lose contact,
We often receive spam offers: to spend an unforgettable evening or quickly make a huge amount of money sitting on the couch. Usually, these messages are sent from fake accounts. Such addressees must be able to identify and neutralize, since they take up a lot of time, which is always short.
Why identify and remove fake followers
It is necessary to find fakes among subscribers for several reasons:
- They will never buy anything. There is no reason to "befriend" them.
- Bots reduce campaign performance indicators for. After all, they do not like, do not repost and do not participate in heated debates when publishing provocative posts.
- In addition to reducing the final results, fakes complicate the calculation of indicators itself. After all, the presence of 3000 people in the group does not mean at all that they are all real people.
It should be noted that not all fakes are equally dangerous:
- Spammers who are able to "shower" advertising space for publications really threaten information and finances. They can post obscene posts. Among them there are many scammers who make money by infecting users' computers with viruses.
- Bots created to increase authority may propose friendship or join a group, but do nothing else. They are quite harmless, but they interfere with getting the correct result of statistical data.
Below, you will learn how to distinguish "live" subscribers from bots. They usually look like inactive or "sleeping" users.
How to identify social media bots yourself
So that fakes do not flood your account and do not interfere with a full work of the administrator groups, it is advisable to identify and block them even at the stage of adding to friends.
To identify a fake account, you need to pay attention to the following signs:
- Celebrity photo, abstract image, obscene pictures as an avatar.
- Thousands of friends and subscribers, most of whom are not real people either.
- There are no photos from holidays, events, photos with family on the page.
There is little handwritten page content - either reposts, or nothing at all, although this situation is possible in the case when the account belongs to a real user.
How to identify fake accounts among friends in social networks
Automatic bot finders allow you to quickly sort the list of friends in each of the social list. networks in which the moderator works
The following services will help you find bots quickly:
The IGExorcist service will help you quickly find fake followers on Instagram, calculating fake accounts when they interact with other users. For the service to work, you must have an account with no visibility restriction, the account must contain a photo of at least 10 pieces.
The application generates a report in which it indicates the number of fake accounts after analysis.
Find blocked followers in AntiDogs will help - a service that checks the number of users blocked by the system. The service is very simple, to get information you need to enter the group URL in the proposed field.
The service will show not only permanently, but also temporarily blocked users. The paid service includes the removal of all "violators" from the group. You can choose to delete only temporary users or only permanent users.
VkFake service will help to check fake accounts. To do this, enter the URL of an account that looks like a fake one into the required field, and select one of the verification options. Soon, the developers promise to introduce community verification.
The VKBot service will help to clear the community from users blocked by the system.
Searching for bots on networks such as Google+ and "" is best done manually, since there are practically no applications for checking.
You can, for example, search for a photo from an avatar on Google by right-clicking on the photo and selecting the desired option. Based on the results obtained, it will already be possible to draw conclusions.
Among the automatic methods, FakeOFF is presented, which forms the lists of friends. Then the service offers to check each separately, for which you need to click on the button to activate the check for each account.
The service asks additional questions to obtain clarifying information, after which pressing the Submit and get basic results button will lead to the issuance of final results.
What to do with fake social media accounts
Fake accounts should be removed as much as possible, leaving only active bots that form a user account and participate in all discussions. Such bots are usually operated by operators, so in essence they can be equated to full-fledged accounts.
It is better to identify fakes and not admit them to your page at the stage of offering friendship, registering a user in a group.
When using automatic programs for cleaning a group, it will not be superfluous to double-check the results manually. The services listed above are far from ideal, therefore, in order to save all real subscribers and friends, it is better to view the accounts selected by the program again.
Best regards, Nastya ChekhovaWhat are fake accounts for?
Do not think that there is no benefit or harm from "dead souls": they can bring many benefits to their creators and many problems to their virtual "friends". There are many reasons for creating fake accounts. Three of them can be distinguished:
Online fraud
Formation of public opinion
With spam, everything is clear: a certain Vasya Pupkin appears in your friends and starts bombarding you with links to miracle weight loss belts or unique patented wolf goji berries. Most of these spammers are harmless, although they are very distracting. Online fraud is a matter of jurisdiction, so attackers are cunning as they can (we wrote about such tricks last time).
Some of your friends may look like an ordinary person, post pictures from barbecues and corporate events, from time to time change statuses to more abstruse ones and from time to time like your posts. And then one day he will take and throw off the link with the words "Look what a lol", which can infect your computer or even leave you with a nose, but without your own account. And if this is a fake celebrity account, then the number of those caught can be incomparably higher.
By the way, on the Internet it is very easy to find tips and master classes on how to create a fake account. So this is a very popular business.
How to identify« dead souls»
As we have already noted, sometimes there are very highly pumped accounts that look like pages of living people. But very often fake accounts are created according to a simplified scenario (in order to quickly create as many accounts as possible), and they can be successfully caught.
Time of creation
Fake accounts very often have a very fresh date of creation. If direct information about the date of the account creation is not available, you can roughly calculate the year using the profile ID number. If this number is close to the number of 100 million, then the account was created around 2010, if the number is close to 180 million, then this is more likely 2012, and so on.
personal information
Very often, such information is hidden, absent or filled with ridiculous data that immediately betrays a fake. For example, if "Vasya Pupkin" is written less and less, then the simplest combinations like "Katya Ivanova" or "Petya Sidorov" are quite common. You can also often find a combination of a rare old name with an ordinary surname, such as: "Mitrofan Petrov" or "Paphnutiy Kuznetsov".
Avatar
Most often, fakes have abstract landscapes or other people's portraits. Moreover, in the case of portraits, these are often very high-quality portraits, with lighting and post-processing, or even erotic pictures. To find out whose photo is actually used, you need to do a search in the image and find duplicates. This is called "reverse image search" - this opportunity is provided by the search engines http://tineye.com/, https://images.google.com/ and https://yandex.by/images/. This is where it turns out that Asya Tyutyushkina from Syktyvkar is actually Sasha Gray from Sacramento, California.
Filling
Reposts and tests are what distinguishes fake accounts. It is long and troublesome to create real records, but to steal something from someone is easy. So the pages of non-existent people are full of all kinds of "Choose who you are in Game of Thrones" and reposts of other people's records.
Update frequency
Living people lead their pages gradually, filling from time to time, somewhere more often, somewhere less often. For fake pages, the following is almost always true: most of the posts were made, if not within one day, then in a very short period of time (tens and hundreds of posts in a few days).
Tricks
When trying to expose the “dead soul”, its creator (he’s a real person) gives excuses like “We blocked a page, I had to create a new one” (they say, that’s why it is so fresh and unfilled) or “I specially made a second page” (for some there goals).
It is useful to know that the real owner of the page can regain the hacked / stolen account if he proves his authorship (paper documents and various security questions will help here), so the first argument is not an argument. In the second case, you can ask for a message from the main page to make sure everything is clean.
Often, a fake “goes into denial” and says “If you don’t want to - don’t believe, I’m not going to prove anything” - usually this is a reaction to a question about a person's identity or his hometown (which, of course, is only native in the questionnaire).
Friends and followers
Do not be surprised if you see the same fakes and robots in the friends of a fake, the number of which is in the thousands. And every post or photo is liked and reprinted by a couple of hundred bots at once.
We are looking for fakes automatically
You can check all your online friends for account falsity manually, or you can try one of the services that can identify active, silent or blocked users in different social networks. So, for Twitter it is good
The State Duma has developed a bill according to which a person will be able to complain to Roskomnadzor if he sees that an outsider, fake account is registered under his name. AiF.ru found out why and in what cases users start such pages in social networks.
What is a fake account?
A fake (or "fake") account is a page that is created on a service using fictitious information or data from another person. They register for the following reasons:
- Reason 1. Safety
A lot of people create fake social media accounts for fear of threats. This is what the user can do to defend against cyber attacks. A good example is the high-profile scandal with the theft of customer data of the largest online auction eBay in the spring of 2014. The cybercriminals managed to obtain information about 145 million people, and such data may well be used for unauthorized entry into any electronic accounts of these people, including those that do not even exist yet. Fortunately, it turned out that the compromised database did not contain any financial information, including bank card details.
- Reason 2. Trolling
Trolling is a deliberate posting of rude messages on the Internet. In this type of virtual communication, one of the participants - the "troll" - provokes a conflict and spoils the mood, insulting the other participant or participants. Few people these days have not come across deliberate belittling, insult and direct provocation on the Internet. More often than not, people troll to entertain themselves. Thus, a person can register in a large community of atheists and declare there the unconditional need to teach Orthodoxy at school. Of course, the administration of the service will block such a participant, so the accounts of the "trolls" are always fake.
- Reason 3. Social and political speculation
Sometimes, when a large and significant event happens, the Network is replenished with accounts of non-existent people. So, after the recent Facebook account, several dozen fake accounts and even communities belonging to the alleged victims of the Boeing crashed in Ukraine were blocked. All of them offered to watch videos from the scene of the tragedy, but in fact the links were to a Romanian website advertising drugs and child pornography. Users were outraged by the cynicism of the authors of the fake accounts, it was especially emphasized that the victims of the plane crash had not even been found and identified.
And in June of this year, the government of Sevastopol announced its intention to apply to Roskomnadzor with a demand to close fake pages on social networks head of the Agency for Strategic Development of Sevastopol Alexey Chaly (the former "people's mayor" of Sevastopol) and acting governor Sergey Menyailo... At the same time, in May of this year, Chaly said that he was not registered in any of the social networks. Then, in June 2014, at the request of Roskomnadzor, the fake page was removed chairman of the State Council of the Republic of Crimea Vladimir Konstantinov.
- Reason 4. Financial
Very often people create fake accounts for themselves for financial purposes. Non-existent "dead" pages, the so-called "bots", fill groups in social networks and create the appearance of the popularity of communities. People registered in the social network, in turn, willingly join the "popular" community and use the services and goods offered there. Also, groups are often moderated with the help of fake accounts; this is much more convenient to do than from pages with real data.
Other personal reasons
The user may have completely different motivations to register with the changed information. So, it is not uncommon for a person to create a page of the opposite sex in order to communicate with people and feel "in someone else's shoes." Unfortunately, this technique can also be chosen by attackers in order, for example, to track down the victim. In any case, it is important to remember that fake accounts fall under the current federal law on personal data, and Roskomnadzor deals with issues in this area.
