Oatmeal Joey Arnold (@JoeyArnoldVN)

Merry Christmas. Yeah, scammers are repetitive and fake profiles are generally easy to detect. First thing you do is compare the display name of an account with the URL. Second, look for cropped photos. Third, study the bio, the description. Fourth, look for backdated posts and especially photos. Fifth, study photoshoped photos. Sixth, study the comments and friends. Seventh, drag and drop photos and keywords into Google to see if the account stole the photos from elsewhere. Eighth, study the age of the account and correlate with alleged activities of said account's bio, where they worked, lived, visited, marriages, family members, big life events, or lack therein. And don't get me started on the kinds of things you can say and ask when chatting with questionable accounts which can sometimes be fun but also a waste of time. I can generally detect a fake account faster simply by studying the account. No need to actually have a conversation with the person. I've got thousands of Facebook messages from different accounts over the years meaning I don't have time to chat with each account. So, it saves me time.