I realized that i never wrote down the different types of Fakesters/Fraudsters that i’ve been observing. Here are a few that i can think of right now. [Let me know if there are other ones that you’ve seen.]

Play Characters.. These characters are meant for fun and entertainment, and to allow people with common interests to connect.

• Famous character or person. examples: Homer Simpson, Stanley Milgram, Drew Barrymore
• Place (university, city, bar, etc.). examples: Brown University, New Jersey, Lexington
• Objects, animals, creatures, mythical figures. examples: Salt, Giant Squid, LSD
• Identity markers. examples: Black Lesbians, FemSex
• Concepts. examples: Fear, Pure Evil, Infinity
• Tribes (real life communities). examples: Infinite Kaos, Space Cowboys

Passable Characters. These characters are meant to appear real on the system.

• Unwilling friends. i.e. my friend Andy refuses to create an Friendster account so i’ll create one for him, use a picture of him that i have, and link to all of his friends
• Friend supporters. i.e. a group of guys create a girl to give them good testimonials and introduce them to other girls.
• Bait. i.e. a passable character, often female, meant to see if “she” can pick up tons of other characters in the system by flirting.
• Clones/Spite-based Fraudsters. i.e. Jonathan Abrams needs to learn a lesson so i’ll create an image of him or his friends and try to communicate with various friends of his to toy with the system.

Note: Cloning is pretty common now. “Fake” characters as well as “real” characters are often cloned. There are tons of Jedis, Jesus Christs and Jonathan Abrams.

There are also Collectors – people who collect one type of fake character.

There are also Friendster whores – people who simply collect as many people as possible, including Fakesters.

[Revised on 9/13 based on lots of good feedback.]

Much additional information is supplied by Roy Batty:

To expand upon your definitions of Fakester types:

Objects: Giant Squid is, in my mind, more of a mythological creature, not an object. There are many such Creatures (Gizmo, Feral Fairy, etc.) as well as Animals (Dave the Dog, various cats, birds, etc.). Many animals are anthropomorphized, but some do not speak English, but only talk in barks, meows, cheeps (Chewbacca used to write testimonials in all growls). Creatures such as Hello Kitty I would classify as icons rather than famous people. Other Icons would be God, Satan, etc.

Spite-based Fraudsters: These are actually a subset of what we call “clones.” Jonny clones were numerous at one point, but we’ve lately been making groups of clones (bunches of Jedi, transvestites, Hello Kitties) in order to fill the system with fakes — so they are not really spiteful per se, except that they upset Friendster, and are designed to culture-jam or flaunt the “no fakester” rule of Friendster, and are expected to have short lives (deleted quickly). Clones were originally one ofthe first responses to profile deletion, in that they were “resurrections” of deleted profiles. For example, Patsy Stone’s first resurrection was called “Undead Patsy,” and featured a Photoshopped version of her original photo as a grinning skull with coiffed hair, a cigarette, and a martini. Many of the other first clones were Borg — Borg-ified versions of deleted Fakesters (the best being “Borg Kitty,” the Hello Kitty Borg). By the way, most, if not all, of the Jonny clones were obviously fake, and there was no attempt to pretend otherwise.

Friend supporters: we create a similiar kind of Fakester, which you might simply call Bait. A typical ploy is a sexy girl fakester, with a pic pulled from the Web. These tend to collect dopey boys, many of whom even assume she is real, and try and pick her up (so this also throws a wrench in the typically sexualizized dating site interaction you mentioned in your previous blog post).

You left out Concepts, i.e. Pure Evil, Infinity, Nothing.

Another group realted to Tribes could be called Collectors. These are people who only collect Friends of a certain type (robots, animals, sexy girls). I had a short-lived profile called Legion of Doom who only befriended supervillains.

Because it seems that Friendster must now approve your initial photo, (but not subsequent updates, apparently), we now employ Changelings (my term, again). We sign up with a normal-looking profile, then after a few days, convert it to a Fakester profile and change the photo and profile wording. Then wreak havoc.

Don’t forget the great term “Friendster whore,” a person who collects as many friends as possible.