You just don't like that account and now you want to check if it's a fake Instagram profile? How to trace a fake Instagram profile? One of the biggest problems with Instagram, as with other social networks, is the abundance of fake accounts. Accounts that are controlled by a robot, by those who assume the identity of a prominent figure or by people hiding behind a fake account.
These accounts are also very annoying because they are normally used for advertising, useful for filling your account with spam. To avoid such situations, I will explain how to find out if an Instagram account is fake.
One of the most common features of fake accounts are spam comments. They are not too difficult to identify, they always repeat the same message, the same photos, links to websites, etc.
It is very common to find such comments in a different language. This suggests that the Instagram account is a fake. If you see an account telling a lot of lies or making nasty comments every time you post something on your Instagram for no apparent reason, the account is probably fake.
How to trace a fake Instagram profile?
In addition, they can also talk or comment with other users with whom they have no relationship. Singers, actors or athletes are not spared. When searching for a famous person on Instagram, the search result will be full of people using the same name.
Creating a fake Instagram profile is very simple. Simply create an account using the name you want to impersonate and then fill in the profile information with that person's details. This feature proliferates fake accounts on social networks. Some are created to send spam of all kinds, others to use the net without anyone recognizing you, and many other times to annoy or harass people who present themselves as someone else.
How to tell if an Instagram profile is fake?
Instagram isn't doing anything to try and stop the proliferation of these accounts, so it's best to check these out tips for detecting fake Instagram accounts. Gradually you will be able to tell if an Instagram profile is fake practically with the naked eye.
1. Check your account interactions
A good way to find out if an Instagra account is fake is to review interactions. For this, the fastest thing is to open some of the photos you have posted in your profile and see likes and comments.
If you see that the photos have no text at the bottom or are very generic texts and if there are also no comments and dislikes, you can start to suspect the veracity of the account.
2. Search for their profile picture in Google Images
The first thing you can do to use this method is to download the account profile picture. For this you can directly take a screenshot of the profile photo with your mobile phone (you can take a screenshot of the whole screen and then crop it to keep only the profile photo).
With the photo in your phone's memory, open your favorite browser and go to Google Images. Once inside, force your mobile to load the full web version. From here all you have to do is upload the profile photo you downloaded in the previous step and check the results.
If you see the same or a very similar photo with the same person appears several times, start to be wary. Also, if you see other profiles from Instagram, Facebook or any other social network with other names appearing, you can already almost 100% assume that it is a fake account.
3. How to find out a fake Instagram profile? Check the followers!
This is another very useful method that many people are turning to. Open the profile and click on the Followers section.
Once inside you will see a list with all accounts you follow that you suspect are fake. If it is indeed a fake account, there are usually two possible scenarios: that it has no followers (or very few) or that it has hundreds of followers, all with names from other countries, without profile photos, etc., etc.
For example, if the account you think is fake uses a common name in Spain, but all of its followers have Arabic, Chinese, or Russian names, start to suspect that it bought followers to impersonate the account as real.
4. Automatic comments or likes
If you get messages every time you post a new photo with generic phrases like "Nice picture" "Great job, keep it up", "I love all your posts" is most likely a bot.
These are created just for that, to comment on other people who upload content related to the topic that its creator has established. The goal of these is grow the account in followers and for this it automatically interacts with other accounts that upload content on a related topic.
Besides, they also use other methods like following you a few minutes after following another account on the same topic, to see if you follow it too, etc. etc.
These accounts they are not necessarily fake. Many people use this method to try to grow on social networks, but what is clear is that their interest is to make themselves known as quickly as possible, even using such "shortcuts".
5. Check your email or phone
This method is a little more "research" and only really useful if you think you know who is behind a fake account.
Instagram does not directly provide your email or phone. But there is a way to see a snippet of some of this data which can help you infer if the person you suspect is really behind that account.
To do this check, the first thing you need to do is try to log in to Instagram with your username from the mobile app or web version. To do this you will have to choose the option Forgot your password?
Instagram will show you a field where you need to write your username. Enter it at the bottom of the window where it indicates that you have sent an email or a text message (depending on whether the account is associated with one thing or the other). With the displayed data you can already check if the numbers correspond to that person's phone or if the email is true.
Of course this is not a 100% reliable method, as they may have created an email specifically to open the account or use one you don't know and the same thing happens with the phone number. Nevertheless, it is a good approach and on some occasions it can be very useful to clear up doubts if you suspect someone.
6. How to trace a fake Instagram profile using third party tools
The great growth of fake followers and the great damage they are causing has led to the development of tools that can detect these fake followers or robots posing as real profiles on Instagram and other social networks. Some of the most popular and user-rated tools are HypeAuditor and SocialBlade.
In both cases, these are tools that can analyze the profiles of Instagram and other networks such as YouTube, Twitter or Twitch, among others, and detect fake accounts among the followers of these profiles. Applications that can analyze profiles on Instagram and other social networks and that will show us relevant information about them and that will help us determine if they are fake profiles or not.
It is also possible to use a page where you have to enter the Instagram ID and thus unmask the sly. This page crawls all of your followers, activity, interactions, etc. To trace a fake Instagram profile.
You can decide who you want to remove from the list of followers. A recent study revealed that fake accounts have an average of 6 publications versus the average of 55.
Only 29% of fake accounts have no data (profile picture, bio, first and last name or position). Therefore, when you come across a profile that doesn't have a photo, bio and very few assets they are almost certainly fake.
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Further Reading:
- How to find people blocked on Instagram
- How to silence someone on Instagram
- What happens if I block someone on Instagram and how to block them
- How to temporarily disable your Instagram account
- How to hide Instagram photos (posts) without deleting them