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44 of the 184 creators we scanned had a confirmed impersonator

In August 2026 we scanned 184 mid-sized creators for accounts impersonating them on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook. Our scanner flagged 67 of them. A person on our team then opened every flagged account and compared it with the real one. For 44 creators, 24%, at least one account was confirmed as an impersonator. That is close to one in four, and 81 impersonating accounts in all.

44of 184 creators confirmed

Confirmed by a person: 44

Flagged, could not be settled: 12

Not flagged, or ruled out on review: 128

Two labels are used throughout. Confirmed means a person opened the account and judged it an impersonator. Flagged means the scanner surfaced it. Flagged counts include false positives; confirmed counts do not.

What we found

• Every flag was reviewed. Of the 67 flagged creators, 44 were confirmed, 11 were ruled out, and 12 could not be settled, usually because the account had disappeared before anyone could compare it. The scanner’s 36% is a ceiling, not a claim about creators.
• Finance creators on Instagram were hit hardest. Confirmed rates: finance on Instagram 29%, realtors on TikTok 27%, finance on TikTok 24%. Career coaches came in at 7%. Fitness creators and finance creators on YouTube had no confirmed case.
• Impersonators work in batches. 17 of the 44 confirmed creators had more than one confirmed impersonator. Two had six each, and two more had five. When we reviewed every extra account flagged on a creator already known to be cloned, 10 of 12 were confirmed and none turned out to be the creator’s own account. Finding one clone is the strongest sign there is another.
• Some had real audiences. 11 of the 81 confirmed accounts had more than 1,000 followers when we checked them, together roughly 35,700. The largest had 10,700. Most of the rest had none, which is what a clone looks like in its first weeks.
• Nearly all of them were still there weeks later. On 4 September we re-checked the 21 accounts confirmed earliest: 19 were still live, 4 to 23 days after they were found. We checked the same 21 again by hand on 4 October, about eight weeks after the scans: all 19 were still live. No takedown was filed for any creator in this sample.

Confirmed and flagged, by niche and platform

Two confirmed TikTok creators are counted in the totals but not yet assigned between the finance and realtor rows, so each of those rows is understated by up to two. By platform: Instagram 66 scanned, 16 confirmed; TikTok 112 scanned, 28 confirmed; YouTube 6 scanned, none flagged. Every flagged account sat on the creator’s own main platform. None was on Facebook or YouTube, though both were searched.

Why finance and realtors

The common thread is money changing hands with strangers. A finance audience is primed to hear an investment offer. A realtor’s audience expects to book a call or send a deposit to someone they have never met. A clone only has to intercept that moment. Follower count did not predict exposure: coaches and fitness creators in the same 10,000 to 300,000 range came back almost clean.

What the confirmed fakes were doing, as our team saw them:

• Taking bookings. One realtor’s clone ran a live Calendly booking link under her name and photo.
• Republishing licence numbers. One clone copied a realtor’s real state licence number and phone number into its bio, and mistyped both. To a buyer, a licence number reads as proof.
• Swapping the contact route. One clone copied a realtor’s “OFFICIAL PAGE” bio line word for word and replaced her phone number with a WhatsApp number from another state’s area code.
• Borrowing what builds trust. One clone linked to the creator’s genuine Linktree. Another carried a realtor’s own published email address.
• Near-miss handles. Almost every confirmed fake was one edit away from the real handle: a doubled letter, a trailing digit or underscore, a zero for an o, a dropped letter.

They do not go away on their own

Nineteen of the 21 accounts we re-checked were still live on 4 September, weeks after they were found, and all 19 were still live when we checked them again on 4 October. That is not evidence that platforms rejected reports. We do not know whether any of these creators reported them, and we filed nothing. It is evidence of something simpler: an impersonator account does not burn out. Left alone, it keeps the creator’s name, photograph and whatever audience it has built.

The other two no longer resolve at the handle where we found them, and one of those was the largest clone in the sample. We do not count them as removals. From outside, a renamed account looks exactly like a deleted one. The full re-check is written up in Do fake accounts go away on their own?

Why reporting often fails

Most creators who find a clone ask their followers to report it. Fifty reports do not add up to fifty votes. They feed one automated decision, and a sudden burst of reports can trip automated action against the real account instead.

Two further problems come up in the cases we handle. The in-app report button feeds an automated queue, while the platform’s web impersonation form is the one a person reads. And that form asks for photo ID: if the name on the ID does not match the profile name (a maiden name, a nickname, a brand handle), the report can fail without explanation. Most creators in this sample work under a brand name. Where a clone uses the creator’s own photographs, a copyright complaint is a separate route with its own queue, and it survives a display-name change.

The wider picture

The Federal Trade Commission reports that people lost $3.5 billion to imposter scams in 2025. Separately, reported losses to scams of every kind that started on social media reached $2.1 billion in 2025, about eight times the 2020 figure. Neither number is impersonation of creators specifically. Both show where the money goes once a fake account has an audience to work on.

Methodology

Sample. 184 creators chosen from public creator directories for outreach prospecting, not at random: roughly 10,000 to 320,000 followers on their main platform, each with a visible business (courses, coaching, a brokerage). The first batch of 50 held 20 finance creators, 15 career coaches, 10 fitness creators and 5 realtors. The second batch of 134 held 50 finance creators on Instagram, 30 on TikTok and 54 realtors on TikTok. The sample over-represents the niches we expected to be targeted and includes no one above about 320,000 followers. These are not rates for creators in general.

Dates. Scans ran 11 to 13 August 2026. People reviewed the flags on 12, 16 and 31 August and 4 September 2026.

What counts as a fake. An account using the creator’s name or photographs, not operated by the creator, and live when it was checked. Namesakes, the creator’s own second accounts, and name-only spam with no photo of the creator do not count.

How the scanner works. For each creator it generated look-alike handle variants and checked each one on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook: 50 variants per platform at the time, 200 lookups per creator. It then ran a name search on all four platforms and scored each candidate on handle similarity, display name, bio wording and profile photo. Face recognition was off for both batches, so a photo match here means a reused image file. A fake using the creator’s face in a different photo would have been missed by the scanner; one such case was caught by eye.

Review and error rates. Of the 55 flagged creators whose case could be settled, 11 were not impersonated: a 20% false-positive rate at the creator level. The account-level pass on creators already known to be cloned rejected none of 12, a far better rate, because an extra flag on a creator who already has a known clone is a much safer bet. The two measure different things and should be quoted separately. The 11 ruled out were different people with a similar name, creators’ own second accounts, name-squatting spam with no photo, and one business that shared only a first name. The 12 not settled were five creators whose own account had vanished, three whose only flagged accounts had vanished, and four where a person looked and could not tell.

A shrinking denominator. Five flagged creators’ own accounts no longer resolved three weeks after the scan. A rate measured against a creator list weeks later is measured against a list that is quietly shrinking, which is one reason the unsettled column cannot be driven to zero.

Liveness. On 4 September 2026 each of the 21 earliest-confirmed accounts was queried by exact handle on its own platform. “Still live” means a definite positive reading; there were no inconclusive readings. Across all 85 flagged accounts re-checked that day, 77 still resolved. On 4 October 2026 the same 21 were checked again by hand; all 19 that were live in September were still live.

For press

The full niche-by-platform table and anonymised screenshots are available on request. No creator is named in this report and no impersonating handle is published. Contact Nicholas Skeval, Founder, Thuros Security, at team@thurossecurity.com.

Thuros Security is a New York company that monitors social platforms for accounts impersonating creators and files the takedowns on their behalf. Every finding is checked by a person before it is reported. All scans and checks in this report used public profile information only. Readings and the account list are kept on file.