Facebook busts major spam network
Facebook has disrupted a spam operation that it has been combating for six months, which is behind numerous fake likes and comments, and spam posts.
The company has previously announced that it has made new advances to detect fake accounts on Facebook more effectively.
These advances have now reaped rewards, with Facebook busting a fake account network behind inauthentic likes and comments from accounts located in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and a number of other countries.
“We found that most of this activity was generated not through traditional mass account creation methods, but by more sophisticated means that try to mask the fact that the accounts are part of the same coordinated operation,” Facebook said.
“They used tricks to avoid detection, including redirecting their traffic through “proxies” that disguised their location.”
The apparent intent of the campaign was to deceptively gain new friend connections by liking and interacting primarily with popular publisher pages on Facebook, after which point they would send spam.
“We observed that the bulk of these accounts became dormant after liking a number of pages, suggesting they had not been mobilized yet to actually make connections and send spam to those people,” Facebook said.
“Our systems were able to identify a large portion of this illegitimate activity – and to remove a substantial number of inauthentic likes.”
The company said as it removes the rest of the inauthentic likes, it expects that 99% of impacted pages with more than 10,000 likes will see a drop of less than 3%.
“None of these likes were the result of paid ads from the affected pages,” Facebook said.
Loading ...