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Fake Name Generator
- lmm 13y agoI am highly amused that this requires a google+ login. Do they detect their own fake names?
- easy_rider 13y agodoes it? Didn't require anything for me..
- aestra 13y agoIt does not require a G+ login for 99% of the features.
- midas007 13y agoSuper useful. Now if it only were to auto-create a G+ profile and scrape to find some profile pics.
- kjannis 13y agoFor profile pics: http://randomuser.me/ http://randomuser.me/
- candybar 13y agoIs this legal? Unless those faces are fictional drawings, using someone else's face for a fake profile seems way over the line.
- piyush_soni 13y agoThat was my confusion as well. They are using actual photographs of people for a randomly generate profile!
- gnu8 13y agoIf it had checkboxes for all of the social networks, free email providers, and so on it would go a long way toward setting up false identities. If it could comb death certificates for names and demographic data rather than randomly generating it, that would be even better. You'd probably make a fortune selling SaaS contracts to criminals in Russia and Washington.
- galapago 13y agoThey even support Klingon names! (after a big scandal [1]) [1]: http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/blog/2013/10/response-to-accusations-of-discrimination/ http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/blog/2013/10/response-to-ac...
- qnk 13y agoVery useful resource! I'm curious though, where did you get your Hispanic names from? Seems like they come from a database of funny, weird and probably offensive names. No one is called like that in Spanish-speaking countries, and yes, I know the names are supposed to be fake, but just comparing the Hispanic with the American ones, you can tell there's a big difference. Whether or not is intentional, it could be even more helpful if you use "normal" names. Disclaimer: I'm Hispanic.
- galapago 13y agoYeap, i can confirm. Hispanic surnames are more or less correct, but first names are bizarre.
- bromagosa 13y agoIndeed. Tried like 15 times and not a single Hispanic first name didn't make me wiggle.
- gus_massa 13y agoI’m from Argentina and also find that the names are very unusual. The usual names vary a lot by country, but I could not even recognize a most of them, and I had to retry about 10 times to get a realistic name.
- chevreuil 13y agoSame thing for French : I have not heard of anyone named Brigliador in France, or maybe in some medieval poetry.
- eterm 13y agoThe England/Wales names are weird too, lots of unusual first names. Also, Wales seems way over-represented. It has a population that's tiny compared to England, but half the names generated seem to be Welsh names such as Cerys.
- warbastard 13y ago
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- easy_rider 13y agoHmm no API available (unlike randomuser). We need automated faking!
- axefrog 13y agoMy thoughts exactly. After seeing the names it generated, along with the the addresses and so forth, I immediately started looking for the link to buy or download the code, database or whatever was on offer. To my disappointment, there was nothing available.
- nandhp 13y agoYou can place bulk orders of up to 50,000: http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/order.php http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/order.php
- ankitoberoi 13y agoQuite useful but the site has ignored about 17.5% of the world population - Indian names are missing.
- chewxy 13y agoHow very coincidental. This afternoon I was talking to my cofounders about test data generation - and names were one of them. Here are other resources that we found that were helpful: - http://www.generatedata.com/ http://www.generatedata.com/ - http://databasetestdata.com http://databasetestdata.com - http://randomuser.me http://randomuser.me (useful for frontends) - http://gedis-studio.com/ http://gedis-studio.com/ (not free) Also, TIL that Hipchat doesn't always pull all the links
- CatsoCatsoCatso 13y ago"How very coincidental" Colour me surprised too. Just 5 minutes ago I was searching for a false name generator. My heart leapt with fright on seeing my recent history at the top of HN.
- jlees 13y agoI still fall back on http://www.rinkworks.com/namegen/ http://www.rinkworks.com/namegen/ occasionally.
- femto113 13y agoInteresting to see this come up. A couple years ago I started and then mothballed a system for generating realistic fake people (which I called golems) using deterministic and reversible algorithms instead of random numbers (it has a bunch of advantages). Got to love heroku's free tier, cause it's actually still on line: http://golems.herokuapp.com/person/random.json http://golems.herokuapp.com/person/random.json If anyone's interested in learning more let me know.
- teddyh 13y ago# aptitude install rig RIG (Random Identity Generator) is a free replacement for a shareware program out there called 'fake'. It generates random, yet real-looking, personal data. It is useful if you need to feed a name to a Web site, BBS, or real person, and are too lazy to think of one yourself. Also, if the Web site/BBS/person you are giving the information to tries to cross-check the city, state, zip, or area code, it will check out. $ rig Adolph Cline 739 Anton Dr Mentor, OH 44060 (216) xxx-xxxx $
- carlob 13y agoSomeone please make a homebrew keg with this!
- verandaguy 13y agoOr create a Fink/MacPorts port.
- SmileyKeith 13y agoIs there a reason to use either of those systems over homebrew? Since homebrew seems to have a lot more community support now.
- verandaguy 13y agoI could be wrong, but I believe MacPorts has more ports in the default repository at the moment. Not sure about Fink. But yes, arguably, `brew` is moving forward very quickly.
- zbowling 13y agoMacPorts is full of useless junk. MacPorts will install a new sandboxed python, ruby, perl, etc when just want to get wget (the built in versions are fine!). The libraries are all broken out where brew keeps them simple and a lot of the packages are old silly packages that no one on the Mac really cares about (every single GNOME library for example). brew isn't just moving forward quickly, it has really just out right replaced MacPorts and anyone still using MacPorts is living in 2007.
- adnam 13y agoI just generated an icelandic hobbit and it GAVE ME MY OWN NAME! I actually WTFed out loud.
- klausjensen 13y agoThere are no hobbits in Iceland, duuuh! Elves, on the other hand...
- praptak 13y ago"Privacy concerns on the raise. A hobbit accidentally outed by a web service."
- the_watcher 13y agoMy Hobbit name was from my home town (I'm from a suburb of Palm Springs, not a normal place to randomly generate). What is going on in the Shire?
- Gormo 13y agoOne of the "hobbit" names it gave me was "Haiduc". I don't think there were ever many hobbits engaged in highway banditry in the Balkans.
- croisillon 13y agoLithuanian names: http://uza.lt/vardai/ http://uza.lt/vardai/ It's more of a fun read than anything useful, really
- pavanky 13y agoAs an Indian I am a bit sad to see Hobbit, Klingon and Ninja in there but no option for Indian names.
- kartikkumar 13y agoShare the same sentiment.
- Erwin 13y agoSelecting "Hobbit" also adjusts the generated height to around 3 feet!
- tragic 13y agoJust as well, probably. If they had Indian, you'd get a Punjabi first name, an Urdu surname, and a 1992 Pontiac Sunbird in your New Delhi driveway.
- mturmon 13y agoSalman Rushdie has to get his story ideas from somewhere.
- allochthon 13y agoSeems to have been quite an oversight. Hard to see how that happened.
- werid 13y agoThe Norwegian name set generates some really strange first names. Plausible surnames though.
- dagurp 13y agoSame with Icelandic names. Also, the GPS coordinates were often out at sea or on a mountain. Using openStreetMap it should be easy to generate more plausible coordinates.
- justwrote 13y agoThere are also faker libraries for various languages, e.g. the famous https://github.com/stympy/faker https://github.com/stympy/faker, https://github.com/fzaninotto/Faker https://github.com/fzaninotto/Faker and a little port in Scala (created by me) https://github.com/justwrote/scala-faker https://github.com/justwrote/scala-faker
- antirez 13y agoItalian names are not realistic. Try #1: "Dante Marcelo". Dante is a very strange name for an italian, I guess it is used in the US. Marcelo lacks an "l" (it is Marcello) so it sounds Spanish instead. Try #2: "Berto Trentino". Trentino is realistic but Berto sounds a lot like an abbreviation of "Alberto", so not a real name even if I guess there are people actually named "Berto". Try #3: "Pupetta Rizzo". Can't imagine somebody called "Pupetta", it is something you say to small children as "Little Doll" or alike.
- jaimebuelta 13y agoHey! I actually know a "Dante Marcelo"! (but both as given names, he's known as Marcelo). But he's from Argentina (where Marcelo is a relatively common name), not from Italy
- kapkapkap 13y agoI think its fair to say that scenarios where a service cancels a user account because his/her name was not "realistic sounding" are few and far between. (Assuming you're not entering names like "Doorknob Toothbrush")
- seszett 13y agoWell, the site did generate Iva Lavallée as a French female name for me. I had never heard of someone called Iva, but it seems it's been given to exactly 100 persons in France since 1900. Iva Lavallée sounds like He's gonna swallow it, really.
- nollidge 13y agoMy guess is that it's just randomly selecting from a list of names with equal probability, rather than weighting them based on how common they are. So all of these long-tail names are coming up way more often than you'd find in a phone book.
- zeidrich 13y agoYeah, similar is when you get names from Canada and look at the cities. The first one I get is from Weagamow, ON, which is a North Caribou Lake Indian reservation, with like 900 people in it. The second I get is from Cornwall, ON, a small city of 45k people, the next is from Orangeville, ON another town of 30k people. Then Wawa, ON, a town of 3k people. Meanwhile, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal are all unrepresented. I just got a person from Byemoor Alberta, a hamlet of 35 people. It says she lives on 1304, 90th Ave, but there's a 1 Ave, a 2 Ave, a 1 St, and a 1 St North. Definitely no 90th Ave.
- webjunkie 13y agoFake names, cities, and other in python: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/fake-factory/ https://pypi.python.org/pypi/fake-factory/
- vezzy-fnord 13y agoIt's a pretty old project. I know that it's been used quite successfully plenty of times for social engineering purposes.
- deadfall 13y agoYeah, it is an old project. I would have posted a long time ago if I knew HN didn't know already. The most useful tool besides this is http://10minutemail.com/ http://10minutemail.com/ Edit: Doing a HN search this was posted about a year ago. That is why I probably didn't post it. Should we start submitting reposts of old stuff? I probably missed "cool tools" from years ago.
- incidence 13y agoI've been using this for testing webapps for years
- aestra 13y agoMe too, and when I do I always blindly copy and paste and end up with very fake looking data... Which doesn't matter to me at all!
- lucb1e 13y agoDon't know where you live, but the Dutch government publishes spreadsheets with testdata. It contains names, middle names, addresses, domestic and foreign names, etc. No need to generate your own. I haven't had to use it yet and I didn't have a very good look, but I'd think it contains all sorts of exceptional cases which your system needs to handle. If it successfully processes that spreadsheet, it probably handles anything.
- gilney 13y agoBrazilian names are quite convincing.
- mdemare 13y agoHmm, in my experience, 85 yo Dutch women are unlikely to drive a Mazda Miata. Although maybe mine examiners are more thrill-seeking than the average 85 yo. Fun!
- Tarential 13y agoWhile this is very interesting, the profiles may need to be "tweaked" a bit to be realistic. For example, the first profile it generate for me was a: -Female -Fitness instructor -Weighing 205.9 lbs -Standing 5 feet 1 inch Individually, any of these things might be ok. Any three could even be possible. All four, however, just doesn't seem to work.
- peterwwillis 13y agoThe occupations do seem the most likely to cause suspicion. Some of them are trades where you have to be licensed or registered to have that occupation, so a quick search would prove the person does not exist, or at least is lying about their job. Then there's the automobile, which could also raise red flags. A Fiat Tempra driven in the USA would probably be suspicious to anyone who knows that Fiats probably weren't sold in the US in 1994, for example. And it might be weird for a clerk to be driving a 2010 Infinity... Back in the BBS days there used to be programs written to auto-generate identities in bulk, for reasons i'm not aware of. They were designed to minimize scrutiny because there might be humans actually looking at the data you used, since there was less automation in terms of processing accounts back then.
- qbrass 13y agoI'm not sure why National Auto Parts would needs a Perianesthesia nurse who runs a website called SuicideLaws.com, but they seem to be paying him well enough to drive 1992 Ferrari 512 TR.
- jlees 13y agoShe could be a weightlifting coach.
- zman0225 13y agoPretty awesome - although I keep on getting Ferraris and type two Diabetes. I guess it goes to show that you really can't have everything.
- 72deluxe 13y agoSurely it shows precisely the opposite! You have a Ferrari AND diabetes! Very lucky indeed!
- optymizer1 13y agoRussian first names (not Cyrillic) are very strange: "Innocent Korovin" - really? Russian (cyrillic) seem more realistic though.
- raphinou 13y agoThere's a problem with Belgium: it generates street names in flemish for cities in the french speaking part of the country. Makes it obvious the address is fake.
- Guillaume86 13y agoNoticed it too, and it looks city-street are unique combinations (one street by city).
- blt 13y agoIt uses non-USA cars for the USA. We don't have the Chevrolet Matiz or Holden Senator here.
- sentenza 13y agoOn first glance, the whole thing looked very shady to me, since the web pages it generates look like this: BakingBrokers.com but it seems they are all non-registered domains, so it is indeed not a scam (and Baking is not quite Banking). Would be a funny trick, though. Get a lot of people to use your identity generator in order to produce some backlinks.
- the_watcher 13y agoI was wondering about that, especially because of the call out to activate your fake email address.
- linuxlizard 13y ago"Per company policy you have been denied access to the URL: http://fakenamegenerator.com/ http://fakenamegenerator.com/ Reason: Not allowed to browse Questionable category" Now I'm REALLY curious!
- meowface 13y agoI imagine the block is in place because spammers and fraudsters might take advantage of it. Still kind of silly though.
- bencollier49 13y agoUnfortunately the English names don't really work as they haven't taken account of name clustering in Ethnic minorities. "Mohammed Bennett" is possible but highly unlikely.
- delinka 13y agoEmergency care nurse for Champion Auto. Priceless.
- thevdude 13y agoOccupation: Funeral attendant Company: Food Giant
- aragot 13y agoSuggestion: Have a 'profile basket' so I can recover the birth date the next time a service asks for security questions. Actually, generating the "first boyfriend" and "my first car color" would be great too. Actually, what about generating a facebook and linkedin profile for the fake names?
- eXpl0it3r 13y agoCould need some tweaking with the age. You mostly don't want information for a 60-90 year old person.
- kriro 13y agoI wonder what database they are using for the ZIP codes. I tried googling around a bit and only found a bunch of "pay X$ to get all US ZIP codes". I'm pretty sure I've found these before for an ERP project I worked for...maybe the CIA? database (I distinctly remember they had some pretty good stuff)
- GFischer 13y agoI thought there were plenty of those available freely. Are these good enough? : http://geocoder.ca/?freedata=1 http://geocoder.ca/?freedata=1 US Zip Codes File of all US 5-digit ZIP codes. Includes zip, city, state, latitude, longitude, and county (Last Updated: March 30th 2010): US Zip Codes (41,755) or http://sourceforge.net/projects/zips/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/zips/ Edit: MaxMind recommends this one http://download.geonames.org/export/zip/ http://download.geonames.org/export/zip/ There's also Google's geocoding API. Still, let's hope the project owners answer you :)
- FootballMuse 13y agoNot exactly. "ZIP Codes are commercially sensitive... proprietary information"[1] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6685917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6685917
- frik 13y agoYou can download the database that is used to update Wikipedia (bots do that job): http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Georeferenzierung/Wikipedia-World/en http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Georefere... 3.54 million entries in 273 languages with Cities, GPS coordinates, ZIP codes, and a lot of more - all free and up-to-date. It's a project of German Wikipedia, but the website is in English and the data is used by all Wikipedia instances.
- allochthon 13y agoThe fascinating thing about fake names is that they often seem to be a little off, somehow, even when they draw from real names. Hard to put my finger on it.
- soneca 13y agoBrazilian names are perfect! Names, cities, phones, etc, everything so realistic! As people are complaining of weird spanish, french, italian names, I wonder if the person who did this is brazilian.
- aylons 13y agoThe names are indeed realistic, but some details are not. First are cars: most tests I made produced cars that are not sold in Brazil, althought some did. The lack of apartment or similar data in most addresses will not raise suspicion in the US, where most people live at houses, but it will surely jump to the attention of anyone looking at the database in Brazil. Not to say, it won't test most DBs properly as we commonly store apartment numbers in a dedicated column. The English name of the companies also won't help.
- GyrosOfWar 13y agoThe German names are all rather convincing, except for the sometimes lacking umlauts. (interestingly, only in the surnames) No one is called Jager here, unless they anglicized their name for some reason (Jäger is German for Hunter).
- xioxox 13y agoI don't need this website. I can go through the thousands of pages of wiki spam I've been hit with. I don't know why they think my wiki would have pages describing random teenagers from Germany who enjoy horseriding in their spare time and were medical equipment mechanics. Presumably these spammers must be using a similar database to this website. The lack of unemployed people generated seems a bit unlike real life, however.
- joeframbach 13y agoFirst was a female dietitian, 5'7" and pushing 200lbs. Sounds like a great dietitian. Next one had a hometown right down the road from me. Cool. She's 53 years old but her SSN starts with 180. PA's SSN range is 159 to 211, and everyone else my age has SSNs starting with 178. SSNs are assigned in-order. See the problem? Her SSN ought to be in the 160s I reckon. Next was a 70-y/o timber and logging worker. I don't believe it.
- evan_ 13y agoMaybe she has a glandular disorder, or she's a special kind of dietitian who works mainly with sumo wrestlers, or she's 7' tall.
- bhaile 13y agoInteresting...one of the choices is Eritrean. Small country in East Africa. Names are pretty close to the region as well so I'm surprised.
- jber 13y agoI love it! ;) Just afraid that many trolls will use it...
- possibilistic 13y agoWhy are social security numbers generated? That seems necessary for supporting only dubious kinds of behavior. Aren't SSNs only useful for banking/credit-type services? (Perhaps someone can enlighten me.)
- belorn 13y agoI can think of several good reason, but the two main ones are: Testing and to use at registration-burden websites that collects personal information as their business model.
- mbrameld 13y agoMy guess is because they are also geo-dependent. Your fake person gets a valid SSN for where they are from.
- jtheory 13y agoEh, SSNs aren't linked to location in any usable way. Obviously your SSN will not change when you move cross-country (so they're not linked to current address), and I think they're only based on the mailing address entered when the card was applied for, which may not even be where you were born.
- kamjam 13y agoGeo-dependent, as in across the otherside of the globe maybe...
- jtheory 13y agoNope; I moved out of the US 8 years ago and my SSN remains the same. My daughters both have US SSNs and they've never lived there; the younger one hasn't even visited the US once yet. If they do live there someday, they'll still have the same SSNs.
- seanhandley 13y agoA lot of the vehicles make/models are not typical cars you'd see on British roads i.e. the marketing name is for another country, even if the vehicle itself is largely the same.
- pierlux 13y agoFrench Canada names are not typical. Here are examples: François Tremblay Marc Gagnon Diane Côté Line Dion
- CanSpice 13y agoI'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. The first three are pretty common French Canadian names. The last one isn't. Francois Tremblay is the name of a goalie from Baie-Comeau. Marc Gagnon is the name of an Olympic gold-medal winning speedskater from Chicoutimi. There are a couple of dozen Diane Cotes from Canada on LinkedIn.
- 11001 13y agoAt least with Russian names, the algorithm seems to apply a uniform probability distribution over all names in its database. It results in way too many extremely rare names. In other words, a batch of Russian names generated using this program would not look statistically realistic.
- mynegation 13y agoYes, a lot of archaic names which are very rare. Also, Russia is multinational country, so Russian (as in ethnicity) and Russian (as in nationality/citizenship) names are different things. A lot of names (but not family names) are actually Tatar, Armenian etc. A combination of that name with typical Russian family name is not unheard of, but pretty rare to attract the attention which is the last thing you want if you use fake name for any serious purpose.
- shitgoose 13y agoRussian names - Ramiro? Rice?? Nicodemus??? Where the hell did they get those from:)
- tommis 13y agoFinnish names were very good. Only thing that was a little off was the car models, which seemed very US centric. Car models have lot of regional variants (big differences in naming US vs EU vs Asia)
- victorquinn 13y agoI wrote a library in JavaScript for the browser and Node.js called Chance to generate user info and other random things: http://chancejs.com/ http://chancejs.com/ I don't have as much internationalization, and it doesn't generate a full user like that (it's in my todo) but perhaps it would be helpful for anyone looking for this kind of stuff.
- NAFV_P 13y agoMy favourite was Brandon Bradshaw.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- nayefc 13y agoThe arabic one is pretty accurate.
- Papirola 13y agono mclovin ?
- sparkyrizzo 13y agoThe author must think highly of American women. A random sample showed nearly all of them between 65-69" and over 200lbs.
- darklrd 13y agoThis has helped me many a time to generate test data-set.
- thisisnotclear 13y agono , Indian names?
- eslaught 13y agoThis is interesting, but the names are probably just pulled from US census data. If you want something to generate new names, try https://elliottslaughter.com/names/rand https://elliottslaughter.com/names/rand which uses (admittedly simple) machine learning algorithms to generate new names.
- vxNsr 13y agoWell that's creepy: The address of my randomly generated person is 1 block from an place I stayed at (same street name, just one block down).
- badusername 13y agoGo say hi! And deliver a certificate of congratulations for being included in the exclusive fakenamegenerator.com!
- cellover 13y agoI am too afraid to realize I have been created in a random generator to use this service.
- codezero 13y agoThis seems like it would be more accurately referred to as a real name generator :)
- JSadowski 13y agoPeople have a UPS tracking number?
- nkg 13y agoI love it! Productivity : down.
- dangayle 13y agoI've used this in the past. Useful tool.
- return0 13y agoSo, I need a new dust filter for my Hoover MaxExtract PressurePro model 60 - can you help me with that?
- mattdennewitz 13y agoi'm only modestly talented when it comes to design and layout, but i feel strongly enough about this to make a suggestion: cover this thing in more ads.
- devinder 13y agoWell, Let's celebrate anonymity
- milkers 13y agoI have used a similar service while preparing a lab assignment for a CS course this semester in my uni. But this one, whooa, just generate random users for your newest service and maybe with a little AI you can overcome the famous coldstart problem.
- fapi1974 13y agoMajor issue here is that the site is linking to www.ssnregistry.org which is pretty obviously a honeypot for SSN numbers...
- Sami_Lehtinen 13y agoAfter quick look it seems that this is only poor randomizer. Good generator generates data which isn't too random and internal correlations and ranges are right. I used to maintain one over 15 years ago. At least City Street address post number and telephone had to be internally linked. Those are things that can be easily and automatically checked. So those constraints need to be checked also when generating data. It's also silly to give flat address on area where there aren't any flats etc. 30th floor on country side? Oh yeah. Distance based address downtown. As silly.