Detection of nodes disseminating false data is a prerequisite for effective deployment of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) services. This work proposed a novel hyper-tuned ensemble Random Forest (Ens. RF) algorithm to detect false basic safety messages in IoV.  Performance evaluation was done using the Vehicular Reference Misbehavior (VeReMi) dataset comprising data-centric misbehavior evaluation for vehicular networks. For validation, a comparative analysis of the performance of the proposed “Ens. RF” model, five machine learning algorithms implemented in this work, and state-of-the-art ML models from related literature was presented. The performance metrics considered are time efficiency and validation accuracy for overall misbehavior classification. Also, the results confirmed the irrelevance of data balancing in real-life scenarios. Finally, we assess the performance of our proposed system for detecting each falsification scenario using precision and recall. The result shows that the proposed algorithm outperformed others with a validation accuracy of 99.60% and a negligible 604 misclassifications out of 153,730 points.