It could also be criminal groups that are trying to make their profiles appear less fake. I worked with the team that fight spam, scams, and the fake accounts

It could also be criminal groups that are trying to make their profiles appear less fake. I worked with the team that fight spam, scams, and the fake accounts that distribute them when I started at Facebook, and they expend a lot of time writing code and building machine learning models to detect fake accounts. There would be no fake accounts if there wasn't a massive financial upside to it, and so they do the strangest things to try avoid the detection. You can read a bit about what the team does at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/ldg/a10-stein.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/ldg/a10-stein.p...