MANILA - Facebook on Sunday said it is probing reports of inauthentic accounts on its platform in the Philippines following complaints that students and alumni of several schools suddenly had blank and duplicate accounts.

The social media giant said it is working to validate the authenticity of the reported fake accounts and will remove them if they fail the company's authenticity checks.

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"We encourage people to report any accounts they believe may be inauthentic via our easy-to-use reporting tools," Facebook said.

The company said it invests millions of dollars and deploys sophisticated technology to proactively identify and remove fake accounts from Facebook.

Facebook estimates that only 5 percent of its worldwide monthly active users (MAU) are fake.

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Facebook said that in its latest Community Standards Enforcement Report released last month, the company removed 1.7 billion fake accounts from Facebook globally in the first quarter.

"Thanks to the use of sophisticated technology, we were able to proactively identify 99.7% of these accounts before anyone reported them to us."

The company added that these metrics don't include attempts to create fake accounts that it blocks at the time of account creation – which are in the millions.