Israeli start-up FakeOff has developed an app that detects fake Facebook accounts to help combat identity theft and cyber-impersonation on social networking sites. The app claims to help Facebook users identify scams and protect them from fraudulent accounts posing as genuine friends.
Up to 10 Percent of Accounts Are Fake
According to FakeOff Creator Eliran Shachar, up to 10 percent of Facebook accounts are falsified, with millions of phony identities on the world’s largest social networking site, according to The Economic Times. Behind these bogus accounts can be a variety of criminal groups. These groups seek information to lure people into scams, or to use the information for criminal activity such as home invasions or identity theft. In worst-case scenarios, bogus accounts have been linked to pedophile rings.
How the App Helps
The FakeOff app scans users’ profiles using sophisticated algorithms to investigate the Facebook friends of the user. It works by assessing Facebook timeline activity for the previous year, checking for abnormal activity. The app also checks photographs to ascertain whether they are real or stolen from the web, cross-checking the information with all investigations on that profile and calculating the result into a score ranging from one to 10. “Twenty-four percent of investigations conducted in the app return as fake. A fake profile can be very complex,” Shachar said in a statement. He went on to mention that the company does not view the results of photo investigations for privacy reasons, but users can view them, reports Techie News.
According to Shachar, nearly 8 percent of all Facebook profiles are duplicates, about 2 percent are mis-classified, and around 1 percent were identified as “undesirable.” FakeOff has been live for just over two months and currently has 15,000 users.
Identity Theft Has Grown Easy With Facebook
Ex-con man Frank Abagnale—famously played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film Catch Me If You Can—has warned that the information users place on Facebook makes it very easy for criminals to steal identities: “If you tell me your date of birth and where you’re born [on Facebook,] I’m 98 percent [of the way] to stealing your identity,” he said. He further warned that children are particularly at risk because they are less aware of the dangers of sharing information online, reports The Guardian. FakeOff and other similar apps are a good way to help protect personal information online, but they are no substitution for real education about the risks of posting such information online in the first place.
Would you use an app to scan your Facebook friends for fake profiles?
Image courtesy of Stock.xchng
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