Fake Accounts and Clone Profiles Identification on Social Media Using Machine Learning Algorithms

Abstract

Fake and Clone profiles are creating dangerous security problems to social network users. Cloning of user profiles is one serious threat, where already existing user’s details are stolen to create duplicate profiles and then it is misused for damaging the identity of original profile owner. They can even launch threats like phishing, stalking, spamming etc. Fake profile is the creation of profile in the name of a person or a company which does not really exist in social media, to carry out malicious activities. In this paper, a detection method has been proposed which can detect Fake and Clone profiles in Twitter. Fake profiles are detected based on number of abuse reports, number of comments per day and number of rejected friend requests, a person who are using fake account. For Profile Cloning detection two Machine Learning algorithms are used. One using Random forest Classification algorithm for classifying the data and Support Vector Machine algorithm. This project has worked with other ML algorithms, those training and testing results are included in this paper.