FakeOff app to detect bogus Facebook accounts

Also, FakeOff crosses information from all investigations and calculates results of a user based on other investigations on the same suspect, he said.

FakeOff has been live for two months now and has over 15,000 users so far.

“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,” he said.

According to Facebook, about 14.3 crore accounts on the social networking site may be false or duplicate, with a major chunk of them coming from developing markets like India and Turkey.

The firm said it estimates up to 7.9 per cent accounts being duplicate and up to 2.1 per cent and up to 1.2 per cent accounts being user-misclassified and un-desirable, respectively.

Facebook's monthly active users (MAUs) stood at 1.19 billion as of September 30, 2013.