The official account is gone, and the record still says it’s real

Accounts die, get renamed or are handed on, and websites lapse and are bought by someone else. The public records that link a person or a brand to “their” accounts are slow to notice.

Verified Handles’ handle checker asks YouTube, GitHub and Deezer, through each platform’s own official interface, whether each account we list still exists. On 28 October 2026 it had a verdict on 51,263 of the handles we list. 1,135 of them (2.2%) no longer exist or have been renamed, on 1,025 entries. For 1,108 of those 1,135 (97.6%), Wikidata, the open knowledge base that search engines, voice assistants and AI systems draw on, still records the account as current.

A dead “official” link is worse than none. A lapsed handle can be registered by anyone, and a lapsed domain bought by anyone, and both inherit the trust of the record that still points at them. The US Federal Trade Commission told Congress’s Joint Economic Committee on 25 March 2026, in its prepared statement:

“The most frequently reported fraud since 2020 consistently has been imposter scams. In 2025, the Commission received over 1 million reports about imposter frauds, with consumers reporting over $3.5 billion in losses.”

Those are losses that consumers reported to the FTC, not every loss.

Which accounts have gone

The share of the handles the checker has a verdict on that no longer exist, by the kind of entry they are on:

By platform: on YouTube, 1,100 of 42,565 (2.6%: 678 channels and 411 handles not found, 11 handles renamed); on GitHub, 24 of 1,518 (1.6%); on Deezer, 11 of 7,180 (0.2%).

Two examples, both brands. Cisco lists the YouTube handle @CiscoSystems, and Aegon @aegonnv. YouTube reported both as not found on 26 October 2026, and Wikidata still lists both as current. Both companies are still on YouTube: each entry also lists a channel, by its ID, that the checker found live on 23 or 24 October. The risk is the stale address, which someone else could take, not that the brand has left.

A verdict can change. In early October YouTube reported five brands’ handles as not found: Cisco’s, Aegon’s, Lacoste’s, Duracell’s and Argenta’s. When checked again on 26 October, the last three were found. That is why the checker never changes an entry by itself: what it finds goes to our team.

What Verified Handles has removed, and what is left

Since 10 October 2026, Verified Handles’ Wikidata sync takes an account off an entry a few days after Wikidata marks it as deprecated, gives it an end date, or replaces it (how we gather and check handles). By 28 October the sync’s edits had removed 12,045 handles from 10,818 entries, 11,749 of them in the first four days as it worked through the backlog.

Office accounts show why dating matters. On 11 October, @PressSec was on six former White House press secretaries’ entries, and @POTUS on Barack Obama’s and Joe Biden’s as well as Donald Trump’s. On 28 October, @POTUS is on Donald Trump’s entry only, and @PressSec on none. A record that does not date an office account hands readers to whoever held the job before.

What is left: 1,259 handles from Wikidata, on 852 entries, are still on Verified Handles pages although Wikidata no longer lists them as current; 891 of them are websites. Some are waiting out a 12-hour grace period and a second reading of Wikidata. The sync holds others for a person to look at: 97 entries where most of the handles lapsed at once, and accounts Wikidata dropped outright that the checker still finds live.

Websites that changed hands

On 9 October 2026, before removals began, we checked a random sample of 48 official websites that Wikidata no longer listed as current. 6 of the 48 (13%; 95% confidence interval 6–25%) served a betting site, a spam portal, an ad redirect or a domain-for-sale page. Of the five such domains we checked again on 11 October, four are no longer on Verified Handles. The fifth is still listed, because Wikidata lists it as current: the website of the singer Chrisette Michele, which on 28 October sent our request through a chain of redirects to an unrelated car dealer’s site.

How to check an account

Start from the person’s or organisation’s own website, typed in rather than followed from a message, and check that the account links back to it. Look the name up on Verified Handles and compare the handle exactly. Our guide how to check an official account has the rest.

Method and limits

• Where the figures come from. Verified Handles’ production database, read-only, on 28 October 2026 between 20:55 and 21:00 UTC. The database is live, so the figures move every hour.
• The checker’s verdicts. For each handle, its latest verdict. The checker has run on production since 2 October 2026; the latest verdicts here date from 21 to 28 October. It covers only YouTube, GitHub and Deezer, the platforms with an official way to ask. A YouTube handle “not found” can be a renamed handle whose channel lives on under its ID, and a verdict can be wrong or change, as three of the five brands above show.
• “Still current on Wikidata” means Wikidata’s statement of the account is present, not deprecated and has no end date, as our copy of Wikidata last read it. Each entry is read again at least every five days.
• Kinds of entry come from what Wikidata says about each entry: occupation (politician; journalist; YouTuber, streamer, influencer, TikToker or podcaster for creators), industry (financial services or banking), and the kind of organisation. An entry can be in more than one group. Government agencies are not a kind we record. Only entries that are neither merged nor blocked are counted.
• Removed counts come from the sync’s own edit summaries (“removed N handles Wikidata no longer lists”). They leave out a handle replaced by a new value in the same edit. The table by kind of entry counts only entries still listed today, so its rows add up to less than the total.
• What is left is an upper bound: it counts a website whose http:// address has lapsed while its https:// address is still listed.
• The website sample is 48 sites, so its rate is uncertain: the true share could be anywhere from about 6% to 25%.
• What Verified Handles lists is what Wikidata, the site’s own history since 2020 and our reviewers record. An account missing from it does not prove that none exists.
• This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked by its author, who re-ran every figure on the day.

The figures behind this article, like all of Verified Handles’ data, are CC0. The queries, run against the database with read-only access:

-- The checker's latest verdict on each listed handle (entries neither merged nor blocked)
WITH latest AS (
  SELECT DISTINCT ON (platform_id, value_norm) platform_id, value_norm, verdict
    FROM handle_check ORDER BY platform_id, value_norm, checked_at DESC)
SELECT h.platform_id, l.verdict, count(*) handles, count(DISTINCT h.entity_id) entries
  FROM handle h JOIN latest l USING (platform_id, value_norm)
  JOIN entity e ON e.id = h.entity_id AND e.merged_into IS NULL AND NOT e.blocked
 GROUP BY ROLLUP (1, 2);

-- Of the dead or renamed, how many Wikidata still lists as current
SELECT count(*) FILTER (WHERE c.present AND NOT c.ended AND c.rank IS DISTINCT FROM 'deprecated') still_current
  FROM handle h JOIN latest l USING (platform_id, value_norm)
  JOIN entity e ON e.id = h.entity_id AND e.merged_into IS NULL AND NOT e.blocked
  LEFT JOIN wikidata_claim c ON c.qid = e.qid AND c.platform_id = h.platform_id AND c.value_norm = h.value_norm
 WHERE l.verdict IN ('dead', 'renamed');

-- What the sync removed, from its edit summaries
SELECT sum((regexp_match(summary, 'removed ([0-9]+) handles? Wikidata no longer lists'))[1]::int), count(DISTINCT entity_id)
  FROM revision WHERE source = 'sync' AND ts >= '2026-10-10'
   AND summary ~ 'removed [0-9]+ handles? Wikidata no longer lists';

-- What is left: Wikidata's handles on entries the sync may change, no longer listed as current
SELECT count(*), count(DISTINCT e.id)
  FROM wikidata_claim c
  JOIN entity e ON e.qid = c.qid AND NOT e.protected AND e.claimed_by IS NULL AND NOT e.blocked AND e.merged_into IS NULL
  JOIN handle h ON h.entity_id = e.id AND h.platform_id = c.platform_id AND h.value_norm = c.value_norm AND h.source = 'wikidata'
 WHERE c.lapsed_since IS NOT NULL AND (NOT c.present OR c.rank IS NOT DISTINCT FROM 'deprecated' OR c.ended);

The kinds of entry are a join on each entry’s Wikidata occupation (P106), industry (P452) and kind of organisation, as listed above.