What Puts Your Social Accounts At Risk, Pt 1: Imposter Accounts
Let's talk about something that's been super frustrating on social media lately, and that is fraud.
I know that's not the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about social media and having an audience. But there are two ways that these fraudsters have been attacking social media audiences. And this is part one where we will talk about imposters or spoof accounts. I'll tell you how these fraudsters are putting your social media account and your entire social media presence at risk and what you can do to protect yourself right now. Like right right now. And in part two, we'll talk about giveaway fraud.
What actually happens with spoof accounts
Fake accounts will use your image or your logo and create an account that looks like yours and feels like yours, and then they'll go on and follow your followers. Followers get confused, they might follow it back. But they also might get really excited because they think you're following them back. It can get really ugly with fake offers and getting your audience members to pay them via some spammy links. So what's a girl to do?
Takedown Tip 1 - Develop An Email List
Email, email, email. I cannot express to you the importance of having an email list. It is far more important than having a certain number of social media followers. If you have the email addresses of people in your audience, you can email them and tell them about this imposter problem. On social media, on the other hand, if you're DMing people or posting while the imposter can turn around and call themselves the legitimate account too and they can post about how they're the legitimate account too. See the problem? It is so much harder to control without an email list.
Takedown Tip 2 - Register Your Trademark
Next, think about registering your trademark. Without a registered trademark (and even to be honest, sometimes even with a registered trademark, but certainly without a registered trademark) the powers that be will not even consider a takedown claim or reported account because they don't want to get in the middle of a dispute. It is nearly impossible to succeed with a takedown request without a registered trademark.
Takedown Tip 3 - Use Your Face
And then finally, and this is when you might not have thought about, use your beautiful face your own picture as your profile image. Instagram specifically makes it kind of hard to report these accounts, right? However, there's a reporting option where you can submit a valid government ID showing your face in order to report the imposter account. So if you're using your face on your account, you can submit your government-issued ID your face is there, they see the imposter. Or at least that's what should happen. That allows the platform to determine, "Yes, this is the true you."