Identity Theft on Social Media (2)
Last week, we saw exactly what identity theft is. This time we will look at the differences between networks, and give you some tips to help you react if your identity is ever stolen.
Which Networks Are Affected?
Facebook is a widely used platform, notably by businesses.
Identity theft on Facebook often involves fake promotions for your products, and fake recruitment campaigns.
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These are most often “pages,” more rarely “groups.” Personal “profiles” are much less common. In general, these fake pages are used to collect personal information, which is then resold to marketing companies or used for illegal purposes.
LinkedIn is a platform oriented mainly toward professionals.
On this network, the most common form is identity theft of a company's executives and managers.
It involves using a person's already established career to gather contacts and rebuild a network – once again to collect information, which can then be resold to third parties or, possibly, used for malicious purposes to tarnish a person's reputation.
Twitter is a public messaging platform used as much by individuals as by brands, political parties or institutions.
One of the most common practices on Twitter is to launch a fake promotion that collects users' email addresses. These addresses are then resold to the organizers of phishing campaigns or to unscrupulous marketing companies that then monetize your data.
Twitter is also one of the tools most used to discredit a public figure. The discrediting campaign starts with the creation of a fake account, which uses the name of a well-known person to spread calls for hatred or violence, to attack other internet users, and, generally, to engage in activity that would give a negative image of that person.
Instagram is a platform where small businesses, individual entrepreneurs and influencers are particularly well represented.
Sometimes, only your photos will be stolen to create a fake profile that has nothing to do with your activity. In other cases, your entire profile will be cloned – a nearly identical name, the same profile photos and shared photos, your logo, your bio, your hashtags… Sometimes, your illegal copy will even have far more followers than you!
Once again the goal is either to collect information in order to resell it, or to get people to click on a phishing link.
How to React?
Social media platforms all have tools for requesting the removal of fake accounts.
This page lets you “report an impersonator.”
This page explains what to do to report identity theft. You can either report an account directly, or report a user directly from a profile or a tweet. However, remember that parody accounts are allowed on Twitter – so note that if that is the case for the account you want to report, Twitter will not act.
Instagram investigates impersonation only if it is reported by the victim or by a representative of the person concerned. If you know the person but do not legally represent them, you must therefore tell them that their account is being impersonated so that they can take the steps themselves.
If you are on Instagram and notice a violation, you must go through the app's menu – the “…” – then “report.”
If you do not have an account there, a form exists on this page.
Is It Effective?
Many testimonials online show that very often, a lot of effort is needed to get a fake account removed and that users have great difficulty reaching the support services of social media platforms, which often respond only with automated messages.
This influencer, for example, was lucky – the fake account of her business was quickly removed – yet she says that it cost 3 people several days of work, and that it was very difficult if not impossible to communicate with Instagram.
This blogger, on the other hand, has so much difficulty getting the pro-Trump copy of her account removed that she is appealing to her community for help to multiply the reports on the fake account. In her case, the attack seems very personal and probably goes beyond a mere commercial nuisance.
This report by the strategic communications team of NATO – which looks at manipulation on social media with political objectives – even showed that more than 90% of reported accounts were never removed.
A Proactive Approach
- You can carry out regular searches on your brand name or personal name. However, do not forget to add credible, similar variants – doubling a consonant, adding a symbol such as an “underscore” (_), adding a number…
- If you have specific hashtags (containing your brand name, for example), remember to check them daily.
- You can use Google Images to search for images identical to your logo, your banner, or your personal photos – such as your profile photo, for example.
If this monitoring seems complicated and time-consuming to you, don't hesitate to call on a team of experts. Our teams have more than ten years of experience in removing fake accounts and monitoring for identity theft!
On social media, it is relatively easy to steal an identity. Constant monitoring is therefore necessary to make sure no one appropriates your brand's identity or claims to be you. Indeed, the risk to your brand is high – it is your online reputation that is at stake!
Identity theft automatically leads to a loss of trust among your customers, and therefore to a loss of revenue.
Join us in May for our article on the fight against illegal IPTV.
