Services of fake interactions on social networks, exposed

Recent research has looked at fake interaction services on social media. In addition to cataloging the fraudulent ecosystem of “likes”, reproductions, followers or online visits, the study points out the economic models that support it and the high level of personalization offered by these services.

The research has been carried out by a team from the Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) and IMDEA Networks, in Spain.

“There is an extensive catalog of services covered by fake interaction touting panels. You can buy any form of interaction from any global or local service”, points out one of the authors of the study, Juan Tapiador, a professor in the Department of Information Technology at UC3M.

Another conclusion reached by the researchers is the level of “customization” of these services. For example, for many interactions (music plays, video viewing or “likes” on social networks) you can choose the geographical origin of the account that will do so and the gender (male or female).

“A third finding of interest is the disparity in prices between providers of the same service, which suggests that it is a still developing market where the market value of this service is unknown,” adds Juan Tapiador.

According to the results of the study, among the cheapest rates are buying direct traffic to a web page, getting “likes” on Instagram or views on multimedia platforms. For example, 1,000 “likes” on Instagram cost 1.3 euros, while 2 euros get 1,000 views on YouTube or 1,000 plays on Spotify. It is interesting to note that several services are offered free for customers to check the quality of these and thus convince them to invest in different ones. In this way, for less than 9 cents you get 1000 views on TikTok, SoundCloud or Instagram/IGTV. Buying followers on Instagram is somewhat more expensive: for 4.3 euros you get 1,000. And then there are other more expensive services because they involve some customization, such as reviews on Google or TripAdvisor, which oscillate around 1 euro per text.

The market for fake social media interactions is booming. (Illustration: Amazings/NCYT)

As Narseo Vallina-Rodríguez, associate research professor at IMDEA Networks and another of the authors of the paper, comments, “potential consumers of this type of service can be of any type depending on the type of review: from influencers who want to promote their channels on social networks to brands that try to promote the visibility of their products”.

This study is part of a larger research project on the ecosystem of services that provide false identity and activity services on the Internet. The objective of this research is to quantify and analyze the evolution of the global market price of services that (re)sell artificial interactions on social networks and content distribution platforms, something that has been little studied in the academic literature, according to the researchers.

Some platforms regularly provide reports on what they call “inorganic behavior”, especially to report the volume of deactivated accounts and the purpose they served. However, the total volume of interaction that turns out to be false on current platforms is unknown.

Is there any way to detect this fraudulent use of social networks? “Platform providers can apply proactive measures to detect and identify accounts used to generate fake reviews. In the past, efforts to detect fake accounts on social networks such as Twitter have been very effective and could be applied to attack this problem. However, it is a very expensive effort”, explains Vallina-Rodríguez.

To carry out this study, the researchers identified a significant sample of interaction resale panels (more than fifty) and collected data every day for 4 months on their catalog of services and the evolution of their prices. Once all these data were filtered and standardized, they were processed to analyze the catalog of services, the evolution of prices, the factors that affect the latter and the buying and selling activity in specialized forums.

The study is titled “An Analysis of fake social media engagement services”. And it has been published in the academic journal Computers & Security. (Source: UC3M)