Secret sharing or secret splitting refers to methods for distributing a secret among a group of participants, each of whom is allocated a share of the secret. The secret can be reconstructed only when a sufficient number of shares are combined together. Individual shares are of no use on their own. Visual secret sharing (VSS) is an alternate form of secret sharing, where the visual information to be shared is distributed /encrypted in such a way that decryption done using Human Visual System. Visual secret is efficient since secret decoding only depends on the human vision system .There are several visual cryptographic schemes to encode the secret image into shares. In these schemes, normally a participant holds one share, and when the participants stack a sufficient number of shares, the secret image /the original image can be reconstructed through the human visual system. As we know where security is enforcing, there will be some provision to spoil the system. So in this case the dishonest participant, aka cheater, can provide a fake share to cheat other participants thereby he may reconstruct the original one and can use the same for any illegal purpose. In this paper, we propose a cheater identification method by adding an extra alpha channel with each share that contains the authentication information related to that particular share. Moreover the proposed scheme can be used with any visual cryptographic scheme to identify the cheaters.