Nearly 1 in 10 Facebook accounts may be fake, company admits

Published 11:53 am Friday, August 3, 2012

NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook says there may be as many as 83 million false or duplicate accounts on its website.

The company said in a regulatory filing this week that 8.7 percent of its 955 million monthly active users may be duplicate or false accounts. In May it estimated that 5 to 6 percent were such accounts.

Facebook Inc. said that about 4.8 percent of its active user accounts may have been duplicates as of June 30, while misclassified accounts likely represented about 2.4 percent of the total. These are accounts for pets or businesses that people set up as they would set up a human user’s profile.

Accounts that Facebook terms “undesirable,” such as those used for spamming, represent about 1.5 percent of the total.