How to Spot a Fake Pinterest Profile!
OMG!!! I just popped onto Pinterest and this is what I saw … The actor Neil Patrick Harris has just liked one of my pins!!!
It may be shallow of me but I got a really big buzz from that!
So much so that I straight away posted about it in a great group I’m a member of on facebook ‘Pinterest for Business’ and on my own profile.
But within a very short time I had someone gently letting me down … was this a fake profile on Pinterest?
So as you can see there it looks like it is a fake, but let’s just take a closer look at what gave it away.
This is a screen grab of ‘Neil Patrick Harris’s’ profile on Pinterest.
The first thing you can see on there is that he seems to be following many more people than are following him back, now some celebrities do follow a lot of people on social media but it’s rare to see one that has this kind of following to follower ratio – the other way around would have been feasible!
Secondly there are no links to his fan site, imdb profile, wikipedia page, twitter account or anything else. The twitter account he has is a verified one so if that had been added it would have shown this profile to be the genuine article.
Third, although there are some very amusing pins on ‘his’ boards there are none that relate to his work life at all (an actor that doesn’t self promote even a tiny bit?) and there are also no images that show any pride in being openly gay – and as he is confidently openly gay that is a little surprising.
Fourth, ‘he’ has liked a lot more stuff than he has repinned … and I mean a lot more! Likes is a great way to get a little attention and maybe a new follower – see the effect it had on me! Liking some stuff but not enough to re-pin it is normal – but liking well over 2000 things? Hmmm…
Lastly, ‘his’ profile claims to have repins from Zooey Deschanel … but looking closer at ‘her’ profile below shows you that ‘she’ probably isn’t who she says she is either 
In fact there are so many re-pins from the fake Neil Patrick Harris board that it looks like it’s done by the same person.
Why would someone go to all that trouble?
Well at the moment the pin’s on the boards are pretty good, I almost fell for it and followed and I would certainly have re-pinned some of these pins. I can’t be certain but I suspect that once a few thousand people are following these profiles would start sending out the pins they were created for – pins designed to tempt you to buy stuff through their affiliate link.
So before you jump up and down and *blush* post on your facebook profile about your brush with fame take a closer look – maybe you will save yourself from the very pink cheeks I am currently sporting!!
Over to you – have you ever been fooled by a fake profile? Please leave me a comment and make me feel better about being taken in so easily!
Fake Neil Patrick Harris liked one of my pins, too. I also got a little excited when I first saw it.
Thank you Sandi! That makes me feel much better
What’s your Pinterest ID? I’m sure I’ll like a pin or two!
http://pinterest.com/sandiwalden/
I got an email the other day saying “Neil Patrick Harris has just started following all of your boards on Pinterest!” Totally didn’t believe it so I sent him a tweet and never got a response. Obviously fake
Crystal you are obviously more savvy than me! Glad you didn’t get fooled
I haven’t been had on that one yet, Gemma, but I wrote about another Pinterscam on my site, here … http://howtowritebetter.net/hello-pinterspammers-no-were-not-that-stupid/.
Good article Suzan, I’ll be sharing that one too! I have to say that a career as a spammer must be soul-destroying, really, is it worth it?
Great post, Gemma – would have got me too…and will now take a closer look at profiles on Pinterest…
Neil Patrick Harris and now Tina Fey like me! I followed all the way back to the only two sites are thinknsmile.com and digitalcrossroads.com that show up on the post for them. Ironically they also are on Zooey D and Billy Tarver. Sad Face!
Was kinda cool at first when you think you had somebody famous bump into one of your pins! Oh well, at least it’s not just us. One re-pinner left a comment that said some of those pins leads back to spam..Hopefully, Pinterest will do something quick about this. They ignored me!
I have to admit I am getting a little worried about spam on Pinterest – what are they going to do to stop it happening? I mean this was harmless enough but who knows what the future holds?
Anyway Sass leave me your pinterest details and I’ll follow you there – I may not be famous but I pin good stuff!!
I had so may of these I did a Google image search on one of the profile photos – it turned out there were other Pinterest accounts using the same photo – different names (all sound made up if you ask me). None of them were the actual person (their Facebook account came up in the search). I would be sure they had no idea their image is being used. I did the same on a couple of other profile images – same deal, multiple accounts and all bogus. Makes using Pinterest quite boring now. The majority of the emails I get are new bogus users.
Cheers!
Hi Micheal,
Thanks for commenting, sorry it’s spoiling Pinterest for you … it really does suck doesn’t it! I’m sure if these spammers used their talents wisely they’d end up making more money and being able to sleep at night!