Facebook Disables Fake Accounts During Major Spam Operation

Facebook is cracking down on spam by waging war against an international fake account operation.

The operation is made up of bogus likes and comments that originate from accounts located in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and a handful of other countries. The social networking firm has been battling the “coordinated operation” for the past six months, Facebook security manager Shabnam Shaik said in a blog post. 

“Our systems were able to identify a large portion of this illegitimate activity – and to remove a substantial number of inauthentic likes,” Shaik said. “By disrupting the campaign now, we expect that we will prevent this network of spammers from reaching its end goal of sending inauthentic material to large numbers of people.”

Shaik said the operation used tricks to avoid detection, including redirecting their traffic through proxies to disguise their location.

The purpose of the campaign was to fool Facebook users into connecting with a fake account. The goal of such fake accounts was to send its ‘friends’ spam. Shaik said the majority of these accounts became inoperative after liking a number of Pages, an indication they had yet to be mobilized for sending spam.

“As we remove the rest of the inauthentic likes, we expect that 99 percent of impacted Pages with more than 10,000 likes will see a drop of less than three percent,” Shaik said. “None of these likes were the result of paid ads from the affected Pages.”

Facebook has made advances to its detection systems as part of its operation that Shaik said will enable the social media platform to recognize inauthentic likes more quickly in the future.

Jennifer Cowan is the Managing Editor for SiteProNews.

The post Facebook Disables Fake Accounts During Major Spam Operation appeared first on SiteProNews.