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,... More

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 Less