I was taking a quick stroll through Facebook when I saw a single comment on a friend’s post that struck me as odd. It was a response to a photo of a dog wrapped in a t-shirt. The comment was in halting but passable English from an unusual backwards-sounding name, Horgan Patrick. The profile picture is a very common painting of a Caucasian Jesus. The comment was:

“Hello, I value making new friendship not regarding age, distance and religion. After all, I like to focus on what we have in common and not our differences. I tried to send you a friend request but it’s not going through. I suggest it’s your privacy settings. but you can add me if you don’t mind let us being honest and genuine friends… XOXOXO”

The account shows a dozen or so pictures of the same person and appears to be 5 days old.

Horgan says he is from Olso but now lives in Chicago. A quick image search of the latest photo pulls up Scott Kufus, shown as a TV producer and also Sean Horowitz, a in Denver on LinkedIn. Neither has many connections or posts to indicate that this is a real account.

A search on another picture from Jesus HP’s account pulled up a link on scam awareness website. This site reported that these photos were also associated with a Facebook account under the name George Amos,

and a TikTok account under Josh Hancock.

There are more names for the man represented in this photo, all of them were used in scams: Frank Doff, Faustin Voisin, Don William, Jackson, Richard Florenzo, James William, Jeffrey Capps, Scott Barry, Ben Elias…

So I did a search on the original name “Horgan Patrick” in Facebook and I found eight people with this unusual name. Somehow the Jesus HP profile (above) did not come up in a search. Here are the first five (two matches with authentic people have been blacked out).

You may have noticed that two of the matches have photos of the same person and are both from Dayton, Ohio (HP2 and HP4), and two others (HP1 and HP3) are associated with Bogue Chitto, Mississippi — a town with 49 Caucasian people as of the 2020 census.

The HP1 account contains the same photos used in the Jesus HP. From the photos, it seems they came from a man in Denver that has two kids. This guy, amazingly, has 1.3 thousand Facebook friends, seemingly all of them in Africa.

But back to HP2 and HP4. A quick reverse search finds the actual name of this man, fitness model and silver fox Tom Ernsting. He has this post in FB from late last year:

As we get further down the list of matches, the scammers get lazier.

HP6 starts with a set of pics from a middle-aged American who likes to comb his hair back but later change to someone who appears to be a younger African man. Based on the profile name, the account seems to be maintained by Lubega Muhamad Jamiiru, who you can also follow on TikTok.

HP7 has photos of the same slicked-back man but he is from Oslo.

Finally, they seem to have lost momentum when they created HP8. He has scant details.

I reported HP Jesus to Facebook as a fake account. Facebook disagreed with me in only a few minutes, so I didn’t report these other accounts. I felt I had to do something so I wrote this up.

Conclusions

When you see an account that does not quite look right, assume your instincts are correct. Most fake accounts will give you clues in subtle misspellings, names that aren’t quite right, etc.

Just because you can find more than one source with someone’s name on it, you need to check the history of the account, too. Do the posts go back a few years? Are there just several in the past few days? Are the person’s location and job consistent and make sense? Is someone who grew up in NYC likely to say “I thanks God for saving my life from car accident today.”

Unless you have a post that you want the world to see, filter your Facebook posts to friends or friends of friends only.