How to find the creation date for any Facebook profile

Earlier this year, I spent a few months investigating Facebook Marketplace, the social giant’s wildly successful peer-to-peer sales product. We uncovered how the company fails to protect buyers and sellers from scam listings, fake accounts and violent crime. The story took months of work, and was based on internal documents, interviews with workers, law enforcement records, and work I did to document scams and fake accounts on Marketplace.

While uncovering a network of hundreds of fake/suspicious accounts that posted thousands of listings which violated Facebook’s rules, I stumbled upon a really useful trick: I figured out how to view the Marketplace listings of any Facebook profile. This is really useful when you’re investigating a Facebook account.

Prior to doing this story, I wasn’t aware of a way to query whether a Facebook profile has Marketplace listings. It’s of course easy within Marketplace to view all the listings for a seller. Just select a listing and then click on the seller’s name. You’ll see a seller profile like this:

One of the nice things about a Marketplace seller profile is it always tells you the year an account was created. This information is often hidden on a person’s main profile. Marketplace listings can also help you nail down the location of a person, as they tend to post items tagged to the area where they live. In the above example, they appear to be based in Desoto, Texas. A Marketplace seller profile will also show you if a person shared their item(s) in buy and sell groups. That opens yet another avenue of investigation:

These are all reasons why the trick I’m going to share should become a standard part of your Facebook account research process. Along with trying to view friends, posts, likes, check-ins etc., you should check if they have Marketplace or buy and sell group listings, and view the account creation date.

Now you know why this is useful. Let’s get to the tip.

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