Having a digital presence opens many opportunities for your brand, both to strengthen visibility and to maintain authority over your online identity. However, this visibility also increases risks. Fraudsters may create profiles similar to yours to deceive customers and commit fraud. Therefore, continuous social media monitoring is essential to preserve your reputation.
How do fake profiles harm your brand?
Creating social media accounts is simple and loosely regulated. This makes it easier for anyone to use your brand name, logo, or other elements to create fake profiles. These profiles can exploit the credibility you have built by carrying out scams, spreading misleading information, or misusing your digital identity.
A fake profile may promote fraudulent offers or content that harms your reputation, often without your awareness. If not identified and removed quickly, these accounts can gain reach and impact even more users, increasing the number of victims.
According to Meta, around 4% of monthly active accounts may be fake, which represents a significant volume considering the scale of these platforms. The same scenario is seen across multiple platforms.
How does fake profile monitoring work?
Monitoring is proactive and carried out by Bots configured within your monitoring environment. These Bots continuously search social media platforms to identify potential fake profiles that use:
Your brand name
Your logo
Variations and homonyms
Terms related to your business
The collected results go through an enrichment flow, which uses generative AI to perform an automated and in-depth analysis of each profile. At this stage, various attributes are generated to describe the profile, such as predominant colors, type of content, mentioned company, presence of people in images (such as profile or cover photos), and image descriptions.
This analysis allows for more accurate identification of brand impersonation signals. As a result, only profiles with consistent indicators move forward to ticket creation, significantly reducing false positives and increasing detection accuracy.
In practice, this means less noise, more context, and greater precision in identifying profiles that are truly impersonating your brand.
Among the main monitored environments are:
Instagram: profiles
Facebook: profiles and pages
TikTok: profiles
Twitter: profiles
YouTube: channels
LinkedIn: profiles
Link-in-bio platforms: Linktree, Apptuts.bio, Campsite.bio, ContactInBio, Linkkle, LinkMe, Linkr.in, Litelink, LKT Services, Swipop, Linklist.bio, Conecta.bio, Biolink.ee, among others.
For more details on how Bots work, see the article “Search Bots”.
How do we triage tickets?
For contracts with service hours, we send to the Incidents list any tickets involving profiles or pages that use:
Your brand name
Your logo
Similar visual elements
Expressions that indicate unauthorized association
For generic brands, we consider at least two combined elements (e.g., name + logo, name + category, logo + category) to classify an infringement.
Attention: URLs of posts, photos, or other content inside a profile are not treated as “Fake social media profile” These must be categorized under:
Fraudulent Brand Use
Data Leakage
Online Piracy
How to create a ticket
The URL used must always point directly to the infringing profile.
Examples of correct URLs:
https://www.facebook.com/profile_name https://www.pinterest.com/profile_name
https://www.x.com/profile_name https://www.linkedin.com/company/profile_name https://www.linkedin.com/in/profile_name
Avoid URLs with extra parameters, such as:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/profile_name?trk=public_profile_browsemap_mini-profile_title
Infringing content within the profile should be reported through other offerings, such as Fraudulent Brand Use.
If you need to manually add a ticket, please refer to the article “Manual Ticket Addition”.
Step-by-step: Creating a ticket
Access Brand Protection.
In the top-right corner, click “+ Add Ticket”.
Select the asset related to the fraud.
Choose the ticket type “Fake social media profile”
Select whether to create an Incident or send the case to Quarantine.
Enter the infringing profile URL. Use “Create more than one ticket” if needed.
Click “+ Add.”
Done! Your Fake social media profile ticket has been created. 🎉
Important: Before creating a new ticket, always search the platform to check whether a ticket for this case already exists. For more details, refer to the article “Manual Ticket Search.”
If you have any questions, feel free to reach us at [email protected]! 😊