As a modelling agency taking a lot booking enquires online, we of course have a good presence on all the mayor social networking sites.

Talent Management and its dedicated modelling arm Models Direct are on Twitter, Google +, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and, of course, Facebook. So today, when we read that Facebook has revealed more than 83 million of its users are fake, we were shocked.

Never mind being friends with someone you don’t know, it seems that some of those friends, and indeed ‘likes’, could be imaginary, with the astounding figure comprising 8.7% of all Facebook’s 995 million active users.

The revelation came out in company filings published this week, in which it was revealed that of the estimated 83.09 million fake users, 4.8% came from duplicate profiles defined by Facebook as “an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account.”

2.4% were outlined as “user-misclassified accounts”, which is when “users have created personal profiles for a business, organisation, or non-human entity such as a pet”, and the remaining 1.5% were described as “undesirable accounts”, in other words, profiles in breach of Facebook’s terms of service, like those set up to send spam.

So what does this news mean for the average Facebook user? Not a lot, other than the fact you may have a few imaginary friends.

But for those advertising on Facebook, the huge amount of fake profiles is a major cause for concern.

Last month, a BBC investigation confirmed this when technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones set up a fake company called VirtualBagel to look into allegations of fake ‘likes’.

At the time, the social networking site told the BBC it had “not seen evidence of a significant problem”, but Cellan-Jones found that the large majority of ‘likes’ came from the Middle East and Asia, with many appearing to be fake.

One ‘liker’, Ahmed Ronaldo, claimed to be a Cairo-based user employed by Real Madrid – enough said!