Fake social media profiles are one of the emerging problem in the cyber world. With increased popularity of social networking websites like Facebook and twitter problem of fake profiles has also gained trend. Usually victims of fake profiles are college girls or famous personalities. If you are Barack Obama you can easily call your associates who will then get in touch with Mr. Zuckerberg and he will get your named clear again.
But this post will guide you on what to do when someone makes your fake profile and you are not as powerful as Mr Obama. There are three simple methods that you can use in such situation. Use any one of this and you can get rid of your fake profile.
Remove fake account using Facebook Report abuse method
Check this official tutorial by Facebook on what to do if someone is pretending to be you on Facebook
Ask at least 10-20 friend of yours to report that account in same manner. Try calling some of your friends from different parts of world and ask them to do the same. Use all your human resources.
If you manage to get good number of people reporting about that account then most probably Facebook will soon ban such account. But just in case you are not comfortable with this method or you badly want to screw the person then check out the next method. It's pretty cool.
Trace his Location. Know who has made your fake profile
In this method I will explain how you can actually find who has made your fake profile. You can trace IP address of the person which can later be used to track his location. This is how you do it:
- Go to http://iptracking.geniushackers.com
- Enter your mail ID. One unique link will be generated.
- Now go to http://tinyurl.com/ ad enter that unique url that you got from previous step. In Custom alias box enter something like collegefun2012 or loveyou29 etc. Actually what we are doing is that we are masking that odd looking ugly url into something interesting in which our victim would be interested. It will then give you a url like tinyurl.com/somethingUentered This url will redirect to that secret url.
- If any one visits the url generated in step 2 then his details will be send to you at the email address that you provided. So now only job left for you is to make that person open that link. Since you have masked that url with a short cool custom link so same will happen if someone visits the link generated in step 3.
- Use social engineering combined with facebook chat and make that person open the link
Once you have IP address of person you can do a lot more than tracking his location. If you are from some college and you find that IP belong to same college then you can take some help from IT geeks of your college. Actually IP addresses in colleges follow some logical order usually and you can easily narrow the location and trace down the person. Just take some help from geeks in your college, they will guide you on what to do after you have his IP with you.
If you really want to screw that person badly and want him behind bars then you can use the method I have suggested below combined with this method.
Report to cyber crime cell
Check out mail addresses of cyber crime department officers at
Just drop a mail to one of them and they will take care of rest. Note that sending mail is analogous to registering FIR and may involve some legal complexities. Use this method when no other alternative is left of if you are really p***ed off by what is happening through that account.
All the best from my side. Hope this post solved your problem and you will soon get rid of your fake profile.
Hi Abhas, thanks for your great post. When I used the method above with Iptracking and TinyURL, it appeared to have worked. I received an email when the creator of the impostor account clicked the link I sent them.
ReplyDeleteWhen I traced the IP address though, it traced back to Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California. Is there something I am doing wrong? Thanks you for the great post, it's been some comfort in a malicious situation.