Spammers posting links on Facebook fan pages to send people to third-party scam sites are earning $200m every year, according to calculations by a team of Italian security researchers who have investigated hundreds of thousands of posts on the social network.
Andrea Stroppa and Carlo De Micheli, the leaders of the group, analysed pages across the network, and identified spam through the use of phrases such as "Hey click here for a free iPhone" followed by links to sites outside the network.
They also discovered sites where spammers offer to set up fake fan pages in order to tempt Facebook users to click on links.
The postings breach Facebook's terms of service, which says that "third-party advertisements on [fan] Pages are prohibited without our prior permission."
But trying to catch and get rid of the spammers is a growing problem for Facebook. The revenue that the spammers - and those running the sites linked to - do not form part of Facebook's revenue, but instead piggyback on the success of the social network, which now has more than a billion users worldwide.
The URLs to the outside sites have their destination hidden by using legitimate link-shortening services such as Tinyurl.com or bit.ly. That also makes it possible for researchers to track the ultimate destination - and figure out how many people click on the link.
No comments:
Post a Comment