An Israeli tech company has developed an app, FakeOff, which can help users detect fake Facebook profiles. The app builds a list of “suspects” for investigation, uses an algorithm to analyze their information, gets results of their fakery on a 1-10 score, and even scans a suspect’s profile to see if they’re using someone else’s photos.

“Recent statistics show that at least 10 per cent of about 1.35 billion Facebook users are not authentic. Besides, there are millions of users who create fake identities and appear as regular users,” said the app’s creator, Eliran Shachar. “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.”

With examples of stolen identities and imposter profiles seemingly popping up every day, technology like this could provide a valuable self-policing mechanism for Facebook users to identify fraudsters in their own midst. The app has been live for about two months and has about 15,000 users, so clearly people see a value in this kind of security and protection.

We have not tested the application at this time.

Readers: is this an app that you would consider using? If you would use it, what would be your reasons for using it?

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