Facebook is the premier social networking site in the world. But it is infested with fake facebook accounts which people create to advertise their products, spam and spread phishing or malicious links. The security company Sophos reports new forms of scams found on Facebook almost everyday on their blog Naked Security. But how do we find if a facebook profile is fake or not? The freeware application FBChecker addresses this question and allows you to check if a Facebook user is bogus or real.
The FBChecker application is available for Windows. You can download it from their website. The download is available as a setup installer. After the installation, it will place an icon in the system tray and asks you to log in to your Facebook account. You can use your email address or mobile phone number and password to log in to your Facebook account in FBChecker.
Once you are logged in, FBChecker would start working in the background. Now you can open your web browser and open the Facebook site. Open a Facebook profile that you want to check. The floating window of FBChecker would appear on the right-side of the Facebook site in your browser. It will load the profile picture inside the FBChecker. Keep browsing the profile pictures of that Facebook profile until FBChecker has loaded 5 or more pictures. The pictures should not have more than one person and you should avoid pictures of buildings, nature, animals etc.
When FBChecker has loaded many pictures (about 4 to 5 pictures), you can click on the Analyze profile button. This would open another window where you can select which pictures you want FBChecker to analyze. Select the pictures by placing the checkmark in them and then click on the Analyze profile button.
FBChecker would search for the selected pictures on the web (just like you do image search for pictures on Google). If a picture is found with a different name or context on a different website, then it is declared as fake. If the picture is not found or found with same name as the Facebook profile, then it is considered okay. A full report of all the selected profile pictures is displayed in your web browser. Its upto you to decide if that facebook profile is fake or not. In general, if all the pictures are declared fake, then it can but only be a fake Facebook profile.
Although you can do it all manually – download a facebook profile picture, do a Google image search for it and look on which websites it is shown or to whom it belongs. But FBChecker does all these steps automatically in a single click. FBChecker is a very handy tool to check for fake or bogus Facebook profiles. These fake profiles are usually linked to spamming or phishing, so finding bogus Facebook profiles is a great way to protect yourself from these pests.
You can download FBChecker from http://www.fbchecker.com/.