Facebook has 955 Million members, however a staggering 83 million of these appear to be fake profile accounts. This is what a BBC report says today.

That relates to 8.7% of their total member base. Half of these are from duplicate accounts made, where people decided they wanted either a different name, username or wanted to split their friends into different groups and socialise under an alias.

The rest were all down to marketing, business and spam. Either accounts are made simply to attract friend requests to then send messages and promotional offers related to that business, or to simply spam a particular link to a large group of people before finally being banned by Facebook tech team.

These accounts cause a problem because Facebook is valued on a “per member” basis, in how they interact with the site, click ads, spend money on Apps etc. This means these 83 million accounts are not earning money, or earning less than the average for Facebook, leading to a inaccurate estimate on the company’s total value. This could put off potential big names when it comes to advertising, and can affect the statistics and demographics of members that are tracked on the site and then displayed to advertisers who are interested in targeting particular groups of people.

On firm called Limited Press that uses Facebook ads actually claimed that their own tracking software which shows how their ads are being viewed and clicked via Facebook, were actually generating 80% “fake” clicks. This means these companies are paying big money to Facebook when they will succeed in little to no sales from the people being referred to the website from the advertisements.

The report that was made was previously available in the following company filings, however due to the attention the company has received from this news story via BBC and many others, they have since removed the posting, just not quick enough for advertisers to start thinking twice about advertising on the social networking website. Let’s hope Facebook will look into the concerns properly and be able to give a feasible and accurate figure and estimate for the potential advertisers.