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. Scammers may create profiles or domains similar to yours to deceive customers and commit fraud. For this reason, continuous monitoring of social networks is essential to protect your reputation.
How do fake profiles harm your brand?
Creating accounts on social media is simple and lightly regulated. This makes it easy for anyone to use your brand’s name, logo, or other elements to create fake profiles. These accounts may exploit the credibility you have built, carrying out scams, spreading misleading information, or misusing your digital identity.
A fake profile can publish fake news, deceptive offers, or other types of harmful content — often without your knowledge. If not identified and removed quickly, these profiles can grow in visibility and reach more users, increasing the number of victims.
Facebook, for example, has more than 2.2 billion users. Estimates released by the platform itself in 2018 indicate that around 3% to 4% of monthly active accounts are fake — a significant number, considering that even the platform cannot proactively manage all cases. The same situation occurs in several other social networks.
How does fake profile monitoring work?
Monitoring is proactive and performed by Bots configured in your monitoring environment. These Bots continuously scan social networks to identify possible fake profiles that use:
Your brand name
Your logo
Variations and homonyms
Terms related to your business
The main monitored environments include:
Instagram: profiles
Facebook: profiles and pages
Twitter/X: profiles
LinkedIn: profiles
YouTube: channels
TikTok: 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 the Digital Frauds area.
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]! 😊