# Social media profiling

**Social media profiling**, or **social profiling**, refers to the process of building a non-public profile of an individual using publicly available information from one or more social media platforms. This can include, but is not limited to, information about:

- Who a person is (their name, address, contact information, date of birth, work and education history, etc.)
- Who a person knows (their friends, family members, neighbors, coworkers, etc.)
- A person’s routine (their work or class schedule, when they attend certain events or activities)
- A person’s interests (favorite movies, music, books, etc.)
- A person’s appearance (through photos and videos)

These profiles can then be used for a variety of purposes, including both fraud and fraud prevention.

## Frequently asked questions

### How can social media profiling be used to fight fraud?

Publicly available information, like the information a user shares on social media, can be valuable in the fight against fraud. A business can, for example, use a [social media lookup](/content/product/reports/social-media/index.html) to help verify certain pieces of information about a person’s identity, or to enrich their [Customer Due Diligence (CDD)](/content/identity-glossary/customer-due-diligence-cdd/index.html) and [Know Your Customer (KYC)](/content/identity-glossary/know-your-customer-kyc/index.html) processes. Likewise, this process can help uncover [adverse media](/content/product/reports/adverse-media/index.html), which might be useful in assessing an individual’s fraud risk.

### How do criminals use social media profiling for fraud?

The information a person shares on social media isn’t just valuable for preventing fraud; it can also be valuable to the perpetrators, too. Through social media profiling, a criminal can, for example, find and collect information that allows them to:

- Steal a person’s identity
- Engage in [account takeover (ATO) attacks](/content/identity-glossary/account-takeover-ato-fraud/index.html)
- Impersonate a person to engage in phishing or extortion
- Build a [synthetic ID](/content/identity-glossary/synthetic-id/index.html)