Fake ruse: USA Today calls the FBI after half of its 15m Facebook Likes turn out to be bogus You'd think the FBI has enough on its plate with the threat of terrorism, political investigations, and attempts to nobble end-to-end encryption. Now USA Today has called in the Feds after spammers bombarded its Facebook page with bogus likes. On Monday, Gannett, the publisher of the newspaper that so frequently gets stepped …
Yeah, weren't they "America's Newspaper?" One question; what's a newspaper? :P
Seriously, all those Bangladesh based accounts should do something useful, like friending only people with less than 5 friends, or some other such contrivance. Can you imagine being sad about having few FB "friends" only to wake up and find you suddenly have 4 million friends, and they all work for the NY Yankees?! That would be awesome for you, Kip Drordy*!
*see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Have_0_Friends
I thought the story would go on to tell of fraudulent advertising and someone wanted half of their money back off of Facefooked.
Must be hundreds/thousands of such companies out there who'd be due refunds.
Mind you, daft buggers for spending so much on facefook adverts in the first place.
That Facebook admitted to finding in a single trawl of two corporate pages?
I'm guessing the FBI are being asked to investigate Facebook for possibly defrauding advertisers.
According to Facebook's own figures this one set of fakes is 0.5% of all Facebook accounts worldwide.
How many other fakes?
You're comparing the number of fake "likes" here with the overall number of Facebook profiles - but shouldn't the number of fake "likes" in this instance be taken as a percentage of the overall number of likes for the page in question, and that percentage then be applied to the number of profiles Facebook claims to have?
Suddenly, it's a whole lot more than 0.5%
And this is why fb claim almost 2 billion accounts but always forget to mention that only half a billion are real and of those only about 250 m are real,active accounts run by real individuals.
Do your own quick survey by asking folk you meet in a bowl day if they have a fb account and if yes,how often they use it.
Fb is almost as big a con as twatter,total bs figures aimed solely at getting huge inflated ipo's from greedy morons hoping to make an easy killing..
Strange how many American super corps like crapple,microshit,fuckbook all seem to have had their start from commiting a criminal act of theft from someone else !!!
and then continue in the same way for the rest of their existence..
I don't use Facebook but my understanding is that they try to enforce a "real identify" policy. That is, Facebook wants each account to be a real person. No parody accounts, no fictional accounts, just real people and organizations.
I've heard stories of people being punished or put through undue stress by Facebook when there was even a hint that their account was fake. Ask Justin Bieber, the middle-aged man from Florida who had his account banned because it was "obviously fake". Surely there can't be TWO people with that name in the world!
Facebook makes a big show that their accounts are real. Then stories come out about how thousands (millions for USA Today?) of fake accounts are being detected. That's a big problem if you build your platform on the premise that real people can connect to other real people.
I don't think Hotmail or Yahoo ever promised anyone there was a real person behind each email account.
"The newspaper no longer accepts likes on its page from accounts recently registered in the country"
Accept likes? From recently registerd accounts? From a specific country? Does Facebook really provide such fineg-rained tuning for accepting likes? Why does it even have the option to reject a like? I'm trying to figure out a real-world analogy for this functionality: "I like that newspaper"..."no, you can't, try again in a few months"
"It's believed the masterminds of these fake accounts give pages such as USA Today and American sports teams the thumbs up to appear more legit: it makes the robo-users look more real when attempting to befriend people on the social network so they can successfully spam their victims with links to tat online."
"Here's a person I've never met or heard of in any way with no friends or activities in common and a suspicious looking stock photo, but hey, they like USA Today so they must be a totally legitimate friend that I can safely give all my bank and identity details to."
I know it's cool to hate on Facebook around here, but it's actually useful tool for keeping in touch with friends and family around the world, organising events, sharing photos and so on. But it's useful for doing these things with people you actually know. I just don't understand why anyone would ever accept friend requests from obviously fake accounts, or how people can be stupid enough not to spot obviously fake accounts just because they happen to have liked USA Today.
How many of your friends and family do you actually interact with on Facebook (hold conversations, exchange ideas, etc)? And how many of those people would you otherwise have no other means of contacting? Facebook may be useful for expanding your social presence, but many people would probably find other providers. There are plenty of companies offering email, messaging, video chat, phone calls, pen pals, messages in bottles, smoke signals, ham radio. Facebook is just the fad du jour for doing those things.
As for who falls for these fake accounts, it's the people that DON'T have 10,000 friends. It's the people who left MySpace because Tom was their only friend. Those desperate few will take any attention they can get. They will overlook the stock photos and odd likes list and suspect grasp of the vernacular if it means someone is paying attention to them. To those people, Facebook isn't a means to "keep in touch", it's their only outlet to the outside world.
It's primarily for advertising fraud.
Controlling a few million "unique visitors" can quickly get a dodgy website a lot of advertising revenue from ad-slingers.
Facebook claim that all their accounts are unique, real people, so take that money for a few million impressions from the advertisers, skim their percentage and pass it on to the websites.
Hence this being fraud. The question is who defrauded who...
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