As instances of cyber impersonation on social
networking sites rise, an Israel based company has developed an app, FakeOff,
which helps to identify bogus accounts on Facebook. This app on the
world's largest social networking platform claims to protect users from scams
devised by fake Facebook users, who are mistaken for genuine 'new friends'. Fake profiles look very real to the
untrained eye. They post, comment, chat and upload photos almost as if they
were real friends, but for completely different and nefarious reasons. These can
be clever ads and
marketing techniques, any social-media savvy burglars who wait for you to check-in away from
home, sex offenders on the
prowl or psychopaths with
personality issues and more.
Current
statistics show that at least 10 per cent of about 1.35 billion Facebook users
are not real. Besides this, there are millions of users who create fake
identities and appear as they are regular users as the FakeOff developer Eliran
Shachar reported. FakeOff application uses sophisticated algorithm to
investigate the behavior of suspect 'friends' and rank them accordingly on a
1-10 credibility score. It scans the 365 days of timeline activity for every
suspect Facebook friend and checks for any abnormal activity.
The
app checks timeline activity of the suspect and tries to locate abnormal
activity that indicates an abnormal way of usage. It allows the user to scan
the pictures of the suspect to find out if it was stolen from somewhere online.
Also, the FakeOff crosses information from all the investigations and
calculates the results of a user based on other investigations on the same
suspect. FakeOff has been live for 2 months now and has approximately 15,000
users so far.
Twenty-four
per cent of the investigations conducted in this application return as fake. A fake
profile can be very complicated and some of the fakes that we help the users
find is only for their eyes so we cannot know the final result from the photo
scan results, but the user can easily detect.
According
to Facebook, about 14.3 crore of accounts on the social networking site may be
fake or duplicate, with a major chunk of them coming from the developing
markets like Turkey and India. The firm said that it estimates up to 7.9 per
cent accounts being duplicate and fake and up to 2.1 per cent and 1.2 per cent of
accounts is being user-misclassified and undesirable respectively.
Let’s
see now how this app can be helpful for us.
Author : Iman Majeed
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