Understanding Facebook Like Fraud Using Honeypots

Paying for Likes? Understanding Facebook Like Fraud Using Honeypots Emiliano De Cristofaro University Colege London London, U.K. Arik Friedman NICTA Sydney, Australia Guillaume Jourjon NICTA Sydney, Australia Mohamed Ali Kaafar NICTA & INRIA Sydney,... Más

Paying for Likes? Understanding Facebook Like Fraud Using Honeypots Emiliano De Cristofaro University Colege London London, U.K. Arik Friedman NICTA Sydney, Australia Guillaume Jourjon NICTA Sydney, Australia Mohamed Ali Kaafar NICTA & INRIA Sydney, Australia M. Zubair Shafiq The University of Iowa Iowa City, IA, U.S.A. ABSTRACT Facebook pages offer an easy way to reach out to a very large audience as they can easily be promoted using Facebook’s advertising platform. Recently, the number of likes of a Facebook page has become a measure of its popularity and profitability, and an underground market of services boosting page likes, aka like farms, has emerged. Some reports have suggested that like farms use a network of profiles that also like other pages to elude fraud protection algorithms, however, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no systematic analysis of Facebook pages’ promotion methods. This paper presents a comparative measurement study of page likes garnered via Faceboo Menos