An Israeli startup has created an app called FakeOff app that can detect fake Facebook accounts thereby protecting users to possible scammers and spammers who may have befriended them on the social networking site.
FaceOff creator Eliran Shachar says that out of the 1.35 billion users on Facebook at least 10 percent are fake ones. Shachar claims that on top of the fake profiles there are those users who have used fake identities to create their accounts in order to spam and scam users on Facebook. The app currently has 15,000 users.
The creator behind the app has categorised fake profiles into either commercial criminals or psychological criminals who put identity, property, and personal safety of real Facebook users in danger.
Shachar said that FakeOff employs sophisticated algorithms capable of investigating behaviour of ‘suspected’ friends by scanning a person’s Facebook timeline for 365 days and ranks these ‘suspected’ friends on a credibility scale of 1-10.
By scanning a user’s timeline, FakeOff will detect abnormal activity that indicates a usage outside of the normal pattern. FakeOff also scans photos of the ‘suspect’ to check whether they are stolen from the web.
In a statement to the press, Shachar said, “Twenty-four per cent of investigations conducted in the app return as fake. A fake profile can be very complex and some of the fakes that we help the users find is only for their eyes so we can’t know the final result from the photo scan results, but the user easily can.”
The creator of FakeOff believes that 7.9 percent account on Facebook are duplicate while 2.1 percent are user-misclassified and 1.2 percent accounts are un-desirable.
