Did you know that Facebook spammers are minting close to $200m every year? This unsettling revelation was made by Italian researchers who had previously uncovered the huge business behind fake Twitter followers. The team of researchers had been closely monitoring and analyzing Facebook posts for spam, the fake fan pages serving spammy posts, as well as those third party websites to which these spammy links point.
Their research concluded that creating fake fan pages and getting false likes or followers is a thriving business in the web world. One of the team members revealed that those who post spam get paid $13 per post on an average for pages having up to 30,000 fans and around $58 for posting on pages having more than 100,000 fans. Their calculations were based on only those pages the team analyzed, which had around 18000 spam posts every day.
Facebook spammers generally propagate in underground forums where they offer such services. The study unearthed a network of 30,000 fake Facebook fan pages that are used for spamming. Third parties that utilize these spammer services put in even more money to get this arrangement to hit it off for them.
The researchers also noticed that landing pages from a link usually turn out to be a product/service from an e-commerce site. This is generally done to quickly monetize rather than to generate home page traffic on a website. Another rapidly growing market is using links to YouTube for generating views, and hence money.
Facebook is trying its best to block spammy links and remove spam posts and pages as soon as they appear. They are also devising ways to prompt users to remove browser extensions that tend to hack into user accounts. CEH V8 Training enables professionals to become Certified Ethical Hackers who always stay a step ahead of sinister hackers and spammers.
What is surprising is that a spammer whom the researchers were able to contact insisted that Facebook actually needs these spammers. He argued that they create more interesting content for users to surf. He believed that without the fan pages Facebook will be a boring and empty place to be. He also pointed that users rarely share posts on their timeline for their friends to see.
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