PG - The Blooming Social Media Economics Built on Fake Identites - Jason Ding

okay okay so everybody should get a drink like I said this talk will be more entertaining so there will be some technique but very little but so okay let's get started so good afternoon everybody uh my name is Jason Dean and I'm a research scientist in bakuda networks and today we're going to discuss some fake accounts and fake identities in uh Facebook and uh Twitter and uh and also the growing uh business around this fake identities uh I came to the network security world with a background from dat man and machine learning and uh I obtain my PhD degree in computer science from J State University and uh I join Baka last year and we know Baka is

longgo sponsorship for the bid and we have uh we so a com so fir Wars web cling fir Wars storage Services uh message archives and also like data data storage and this kind of things so we have 150 customers all over the world so if you don't know about it so just did a little advertisement okay but I already know it we have a A caber in the Pro area you can get some free drinks although it's too hard but check it out so that's about me my company so let's focus on our talk today so this are my outline so I will talk very briefly why a fake identity and then other focus on

three studies first one is some real business about fake identity on Twitter uh the second one is fake Facebook profile is for spam purpose and the third one is for also uh for Faceook book it's called adding game campaign and finally give some summary and also question answering time okay so what we're doing fake identity so everybody knows in your daily lives if you have a id anous id or a second ID you can pretty much do everything without being CAU right so everybody love a second ID right like being anomalous like a a fake ID so on the social media platform some people also favor fake account or fake ID they can put different kind of pictures sexy

pictures and then send spam create uh rogus uh apps on Facebook or Twitter so here my uh opinion is like the value of a fake Social account is much more valuable than a traditional spam email right for SP email just send the email and uh that's it right it's the email is being clicked by their recipient or just ignored go to spam filter that's it right but but for fake Social account they have much longer LIF spine so before like a Facebook or Twitter identify them so they can do do a lot of stuff like collecting their relationship they can spam people they can Target people they can pretty much to do a lot of stuff without being identified if it

doing properly right so that's why I'm seeing the value of fake Social account is much more avilable so people are try trying very hard to create fake identity on the social media platform and another reason is that the exponential social network connections so for email s to one that's it but for f social uh account they can friend a lot of people and Target them and then their friends friends can see this target events so it's like a reach at least two level relationship which will be much more uh like bring much more impact so deliver much more Impressions so that's it so we're going to focus on our uh first study uh real business called of fake identity on

Twitter so occasion when you br the internet so some people will say you can buy Twitter followers on the internet right when you do Google search this is the results you say buy Twitter followers and uh you can see many many website are selling Twitter followers so among the top 100 Google search for this search term there there are 58 website s f profiles followers 58 is like more than half also you also see sometimes on eBay some people selling Twitter followers and uh selling tweets so like some people have lot of followers you're going to pay like let's say five bucks you want to promote on their uh to these followers so you can contact that guy and give

them five bus and send them a twe I'm going to want to promote this website or something and they G to get the FB and send it to their followers so this like a service so that's what we find and you want to go deeper and say what's the business Run is it really popular is uh people can get a lot of money from it or not so and uh first thing like say how much it cost to buy T followers so say a list guess many website and also some people on the eBay so basically you get around uh this is not complete so get around 10 or 20 bucks for a s followers Twitter followers this

is 10 or 20 bucks of s follows pretty cheap right and the deliver dat varies like maybe from one day to four days or maybe a week up to a week since they don't do it like in one second or in one hour since that can be identified so they do it like gradually with like under the read of Twitter and uh so you can bu followers right and there's another source like a mention like you can sell tweets if you have a lot of followers you can just can make money out of it so some people I know some people are very few most they have like s or 20 s 100 S followers if you want to make money it's

very easy so just say out tws for example I have at least a few here uh let's see the the second one it's uh Ebay ID and his selling like 2.3 like $2 per tweets since he have like uh 230 followers this is two bucks that's very cheap so if you have business to to promote probably you can try it right so now with this cast you can buy follows also some people selling trades if you combine them together there business it's a business for everyone so assume like so basically it's you can start with $ for just everyone so assume some guy you can create a Twitter account right it's very easy use your uh email

you can just create a Twitter account and then just invest like a $30 to buy some followers from eBay or some websites $30 okay after you receive the followers you got a lot of followers you can just s tweets on eBay right you have some followers and some people say you have a lot of followers okay let's make some business since you you invested $30 right can s on eBay like $2 per to it's okay so go ahead and sell it promote yourself right you got attract some customer really want to promote their business maybe individual business maybe their company whatever and you can make a lot of money not allowed to make some money right get a lot of

cash yes you can keep doing that we're just sitting your computer is right it's not like a lot of work and then you can get a cash can do whatever and can invest more right you get more money you can just continue buy more followers since you have more followers you can you can sell much more money for Port trits right so this Lo is going keep going and going you can just make a lot of money and there's nothing product you need to make that's it you don't need to like into the like maybe restaurant business maybe some drink business right okay it's nothing at all just create a t account and can just make business $30 to start so every

you try it okay so this is a serious business so we want to go in deeper to say what happening and then how much how much people can make money out of it so we did some uh experiments and to say how this fake follows what's the statistics of this fake followers fake account uh what is that particular feature and uh who will buy this who will buy this tter followers how do you know so we created a three Twitter accounts and uh for each of them we pay like $30 or $80 to buy like between 20K to 70k fake followers and this is one example say originally we have four S followers that's real and later end up with about

26 certain followers and uh you can see this I got this picture from Twitter counter so they will track the number of followers for each account and not continuously they me at some point so they track it so you see this curve it goes up uh sharply right it just happened with in between May 14 to June 19 it's about like a month so we did this experiment we able to identify manig followers so to number is 72 sens uh fake account and uh we're saying they are fake because we put a thread H let's say the number of following for this fake account divided by the number of followers like people follow them back

it's bigger than 30 it put like for safe uh some safety like small uh like a FP like a false positive so we be very conservative so at least 30 the ratio is 30 and you have uh at least 300 following so you follow a lot of people that's the basically a feature of this fake account so end up like a 72 72,000 fake accounts and this is one example of the fake account so it's pretty much can easy to tell yes question

the yeah exactly so you can see in this example it does decree a little bit uh yeah slowly it depends on how fast trer can identify them and on other hand it's depends on how what strategy they using IF Z gradually uh follow some people not very sure play like steadily it's hard to find and you can gra uh grab a Twitter stream to post on that account so you will have some tweets so it depends the quality of this F quality that's why the uh the price is various so it's like a $2 to buy St followers those followers really really bad like can easily to tell but if you spend $100 well it's hard to tell this follows

are fake so so that's why uh this example is quite easy for people to say so on June 5th oh sorry uh you can say this fake account following 500 around 577 followings so following about 500 people and the next day is following 668 so it's about like 100 people 100 more following so that give us a hint that's probably on that day like a 100 people buying this account to following them so and on June 11 this cut following 2001 for fallowing have 2001 following so means about 2000 that also means uh actually it's steady there it's just 2001 that's it maybe a few more and a few less that's it I talk about this

later so it's kind of like a limitation for them to uh to be uh discovered so if it stay lower number it's hard for Twitter to

detect

yes if right that that's a decorate so basically that's right if this going shut down they have another like 19 S so so yes right exactly so this you can see this graph uh it's can of stady because uh twet account this website doesn't track this account very often just occasionally maybe a few times so that's why they draw a line like that but basically tells you around May 23 that's maybe 200 following but on July 11th it reach to 2,000 that's it so it's about seven weeks the grad from zero to 2,000 how about this one that one is easy to say it's fake how about this list so they got a uh profile images

they got a name it's very uh legit right but if you see there are statistics like each of how many followings of them the almost like a 635 so basically it's the following same number of followings and also how many people following them back it's about 11 or 12 so they following same Trend like it's almost the same so that's why I'm telling this is this account of fake they created by uh robots and this is a particular list that's falling somewhere else it's not like a gra it from just random Twitter account it's from particular followers list of someone so it's a little bit hard to

detect yes

that's a good question actually right now I watch this website so far they don't do very granular uh categories so basically they just they don't they don't I think the categories they made right now it's like are are they from us or not that's it like International or us so you have to work C small but they don't like say Okay I want all my followers to being female or they age between 19 to 35 no not yet but you can do that if you can create you can control everything right but uh it's fake anyway so but I I I assume like maybe some real uh business you can do that like the have companies do constant tweets they

have a lot of followings they may occasion sell their tweets to some people or sell yeah sell tweets they may their follow maybe a particular have a particular interest but U for selling fake followers I I didn't see any okay

sure yes

uh I haven't checked their tws yet because it's work more but I I did uh insection a little bit more analysis you can see in the following slides so about like people who who bought that and uh also the Statics of this fake account so we we'll talk about this later so here I give a like a ear report of stif following business so you'll see assume someone can control like 20 s Twitter followers or Twitter users so the earning from June 5th to 6th the we estimated them so that in that day they uh have 91 more followers assume like each of them uh involved with the transaction like some people buy like 20

20,000 followers so it's like let's say 20 bucks so that means on that day that guy the guy who created this F account make $1,800 on that day so I think right now people should try it create a bnet make $800 a day right put damn good business right and the average earning for this uh 20,000 users like a we know like in that particular account takes seven weeks to reach 2,000 followings so that means like in s weeks I'm going to have a 2, transaction each transaction maybe 20 bucks so that's about $800 per day in last seven weeks so it's just I estimation so it could be more because it can just fall

more and drop a little bit or they could be less since maybe they just like falling some famous people okay but here I'm assume like each of the falling involved involved with a real transaction like involving just real people buy these followers like compared to the first guy I first spam the Pinterest like make about uh $1,900 a day and our average maybe like 307 dollars per month so it's really comparable with them and uh I guess r p do have spam but uh they have much more like put much more effort to stop it but for Twitter you can continue doing like I just search like there's 58 we send Twitter followers so and there some later problem as I

mention that a 58 website doing that there's also like 20 eBay account selling Twitter followers how do you compete with them if you are the hacker if you the the guy who created this fake account there's little problem right many competitors don't worry this social media error so you can just promote yourself on TT even there a fake but still you can promote yourself like this guide like I saying buy Twitter follows and Facebook pages page likes from B follows. so this gu promote himself on the website on Twitter yeah they do the retail that's that's a good hint exactly I'm going talk I have SL to talk about that problem it's really interesting okay yeah

yes yeah so let's say uh let's see some statistics about this fake Twitter follows is fake account so the oldest one we we found is created on January 15 uh 2007 if right now you have cell phone you can just check this guy called key reals uh you'll see this guy have some tweets have some followings have a lot have about 2,000 followings and I can treat some stuff if you read the tws it's not like a a Spam or fake account it's Tre some Retreat some stuff and the average of this uh like 61% of this fake account created last three months and the average age of this fake account is about 19 weeks about

Fair months so they're pretty new uh that's also give us a hint like how fast Twitter can detect them so that means already maybe four months Facebook uh Twitter can detect them then stop them suspended this account but some of them they can live much longer like this 20071 right and some other geographer status like us like 37% Canada 36 and 55 of them have around 2000 folls that means those those account sold out 2014 they don't do more so that's it so it's going to create a much more ofic account to get more business and average of them is like a 1799 average number of followings and it also tells you hint like how many people

are how many people are buying them right so like I mention like may be a Twitter policy although there's some rate limit in Twitter but uh I don't see official number for 2 but that's I'm guessing like if you are if you don't follow more than two s and you have very few tweets and very few people follow you back you can stay safe on without being detected by Twitter so that's a safe kind of safe number those people don't want break their uh their number they want to continue business they continue selling fake followers so they pretty much want to stay uh undetected and like I mentioned there a very few follows for this fake account

since they robots right and some people many of them don't tweet anything it's like a a few trats and nonsense traits like from different directions and N of them have uh 9% of them have zero follows 51 of them have less than five follows average like seven follows so it's it's a small number right seven people follow them back but if you aggregate all these seven numb together for this 20,000 fake account that's a still a big number right people follow them back okay maybe they have Auto follow back policy right and these are most likely they are real people so some people send real people for each fake account but you have like 20 s fake account so together the total

number of real people that's follow all your fake account still big those guys can still make a business out of it like I just mentioned they can do retweets that's they can do ret they can sell this this like another business not just following selling the fake account fake following they can sell retweets that still makes some impact right so like I found like some some guy I posted on the five hour like you can read from here I can provide you manually to St retweets it's manually but actually definely some uh some some C toning some robot doing that so just for5 so $5 so cheap

right no they can just like control this 20, count just like no no no no so you have like a 20,000 fake accounts right it just asks all of them to tweet retweet the same thing so retweets yeah do retweets the retweets still make impact since each of them have a few like a seven followers seven real one so together you still can deliver your message to a lot of people so that's why it's worth $5 right so and this is one example like this is a fake account he he doing some uh he's sing probably doing retweets right now it's called Phoenix SE expert some website to promote and you can see it's like A600 R

already so it's it's real it's there some people already did that yeah okay the next question like we talk about fake follow and who brought these fake followers right I still answer some people's question like who who did that and uh so first like how do we confirm it's a it's a b account like some people buy the fake followers and uh one is like a followed by many of my fake account they identify many fake account and then if that guy had have money followers from my f pool then probably that guy pay money to buy this buy that right and how many right can be 10 20 100 S is safe number to do

that that's all guy right so as I just mentioned so this is our guy to set up the strle so for who don't know this guy he's a number one security expert in the world so he's not number one top one okay nobody beats him he is number one just accept it so the thing is like uh we find this guy it's not like for particular purpose but just occasionally we know there's a post about this guy buying some TR followers like two months ago and then we also have created three account we have identifi seven 70 s f account right so we just run through the list and see how many people in my account are

following this guy and uh this is the list yes there about 470 people are following this guy and also following of our setup account like Hy po account 400 470 so about 500 that's number of for us to put a line say okay this guy buy fake followers okay I think that's pretty safe since he's a number one security guy so I trust him so so this are images you can see many of them are are same image I guess they uh they grw up somewhere maybe from database or somewhere on the internet but there also some guy picture there which very hard for you to identify so not just gos but also some guys and this another example like uh

uh buying fake followers I'm not sure she's famous but and you can say she bought fig follows for many different time not just once but several times so you see this jump most likely that uh she got some new followers new fake followers at that time and also I can mentioned this is social media ear and who also use fake followers so those people who sell fake followers they also use to promote themselves so like this guy clear size I can add up to 100K to 150k followers to your Twitter account and I definitely trust this guy since he already got like a 500 like close to 600,000 followers

right yes mhm

Yeah so basically like you can let's say you buy 20K followers from them this randomly maybe whoever available in all his fake accounts to follow you right so that could be uh it's a big ratio but still if you time 200000 but this number that's really really big big so you can get a lot of business without being exploded right is that ask your question okay so and also say other Twitter follow exchange platform like this two they are doing exchange like if you follow them you get some coins and also you can promote your website saying if some people follow me I give five coins back so basically just like a virtual money so you can you follow me you get a

benefit I follow you I get a benefit so let's keep doing that right and this statistics about who bought this fake followers so the oldest one created on 2006 so that guy like six years old still want to get more followers and about every age like 89 weeks it's like about close to two years so that means some people it's it's not a new guy who created account and want to get B more followers it's like you use Twitter for sometimes you notice you you want to get fers and then you buy followers right and uh like 23 of them have already 1 million followers 100 of them have 500 son followers 5, s 400 s so I we call this

guy cheaters since they cheating so the average cheater has about 48 St followers the media is like 20 s so probably most people just buy 20 s with spend 20 bucks that's it right and this graph also tells people who most likely cheat on cheater so users who weighs like 4, or 26,000 followers most likely cheap to take a more than half percentage of the distribution and how active they are like how many tweets the they're tweeting already so Med number is about 800 tweets so they are not just uh create a new account and B follows you already twit a lot of stuff and uh 50% of them have less than about 800 tweets

uh 81% of them have about around 6, tweets okay so one more Statics that's very interesting is like 7 75% of them have a URL in their Twitter account so this means like uh when you buy fake followers you have some website or you have some web page to promote so most likely you promoting something just not buy follows for fun you have a purpose you spend money you you had to promote some business to earn their money back compared to like a 31% of a regular Twitter account so oneir people have a u in their Twitter account okay sorry let P one more example okay we just added so M Romney which day is it like a June July

21 like a week ago you see that big jump so I mean I would not trust leader that by fer followers right if he just doing cheating here and who knows we going to do next in the four

years are you about these slides okay you should do this so we have some really bad idea so so we know like a Twitter will suspend is some tter OCC right if if they identify you B fake followers they're going to suspend your account so if you really really hate someone so let's say you want to knock down your company competitors or you have some personal enemy that's who you use Twitter you can just buy fake followers for them just spend 100 bucks and buy a lot of followers and just ask them deliver in one day okay so there's no authentication like I mentioned here you don't need anything else you just need a Twitter Handler

that's it you don't need a password right they don't verify your password some of them they say they verify password but they are they are fake fake fan fake followers s so you don't need tell their password because they're just following you right so there's no extra step so it's it's impossible for you to who Des that so you buy some follow for them and you report a Twi spam team they going to suspend their account like you just imine you want school someone just go ahead okay yeah yeah same thing so this is a really really bad idea okay if you really really hate someone okay otherwise it's bad idea don't do it again if you really really hate

someone so that's about a Twitter so how about like fix funds for Google Plus Pinterest or Facebook or Instagram so there's a lot of more website at least here to for you to Sho in uh and which one is much more expensive I list a a table here so you notice like a the cheapest one is like YouTube for ass son viewer on Twitter ass followers Facebook V lik so most of them um managed by Assurant so it's like a magnitude assor but this particular one is p interest is based on hundreds so that means P interest is much more hard to to get or much more hard for people to create a fake account

and nothing is like it's much harder for people do SEO on them because so like LinkedIn you can do uh much more like seu there ranking on Google this kind of stuff so this why they selling much more expensive

yes that's right that's that's why I mention if you really really someone want to take someone down but still like the judge he's still there t knows it I guess other people know it it he haven't been suspended so I'm not sure how effective that method

is so this is a press list for different kind of social media platform so take a away point for this story since I still have two more we running really fast for that too but here if you want to buy Twitter followers it's not a good idea it's really embarrassing if you been caught and uh if you really want to buy T follows just reference to our press list it's there so you don't get for spending much more money on that right so you know the price the average price and if you want do sell for if you really have a B net to do that and try some expensive ones like Instagram or Pinterest or LinkedIn so they are much

more worthy and some pattern if you want to identify if someone buy some fake followers so there's if you see some consective uh follows have similar following and follows numbers so probably that guy is buying maybe your friends buying fake followers you can use this strategy to identify them and if also like some large following and follows ratio so and check uh me Romany you see a lot of his followers have empty image okay I'm not sure he did that or his PR team did that but whatever you can just check it for fun now Second Story I can run this really fast since uh uh we already have a very good infographic for this like publishing

February so fake Facebook us and Pages for spam purpose and what can fake us do on Facebook when they create a account so they can collect connections like they can friend you and later they can post span on your face and uh they can also tag in spam albums and um created some promotion Pages this is like example of f profiles so you see if you see them individually nobody notice this is a fake profile so they go to college they have a job they have some interest uh they like music so they have email address so everything is real but if you present together you know this it's fake and I pres ID here you can still

check they still available on Facebook and all of them are posting some albums have exact the same image it's like a shs NE shs image and they tag a lot of people like basically all their friends they tag in in this album the reason they put a lot of same image because let's say they have 5,000 friends you can't tag five something in one picture you have to do in many many pictures They are promoting some website let's sell in the fix shoes uh look like this page this is the page of this website weite it's template pretty much similar and how we collect them we just uh search some keywords in the Facebook public search and then we find some post

and then go to their post go to those profile for posting this post and uh then keep finding where uh who tagged them so we grow this pool like who tag them we collect them put them in the pool we tag them again and then we keep growing the night and uh we find about 600 fake users and 700 fake Pages I'll share some highlights here for the infographic still see a lot of picture have same image not exactly the same you see the first fall as different POS in the same

room so like 97% of them identifies themselves as female of FAL you put they put a sexy picture there attract attract more friends and uh they interested both men and women so like 58% of them isur like a 10 times more than regular people and they claim they go to college more than regular people since they can spam their college network and the average number of friends for them actually these two uh two features of works very well since they have much more friends than regular people 700 friends and they tagget more like I mentioned they have purpose so they Tagg more people like 100 times more than you tag your photo or we created some machine

learning algorithm to identify the fake followers with collect the data and then use a classification algorithm like a b simple B to identify as then the give a new profile I can tell it's fake or real like I mentioned this website uh this fake account promoting this web page and then being seized by human security like a few months ago

no oh no for this particular web website they say ne shs but it's fake many people complaining they buy Shields from that it's actually fake yeah yeah so take yeah take doing buy shoes from Facebook pages just move your eyes and go to a star oh and those sexy chicks they're not your Facebook friends okay they're just robots so Rec car and get a life so the final one is the adding game campaign we notice a lot of people doing adding games which is nonsense meaningless game like saying you like this post like this page and you put a comments who whoever else like your comments or like your like you're going to add friends so we see a lot of them a

lot of people create a page called adding game so they just keep posting the same story like follow this instructions comments and uh they can like the comments and then whoever like other people like your person you're going to friend them so they are also like promoting for some either Twitter account or web page or like kind of like buy more followers sorry I kind of run out of time but uh can choose some uh statistics top three are category this f p uh this adding game pages and on arage how many LS they get for this page and most of them created in January and to may this year so basically they this page will

get a lot of L likes and later they can do whatever like promoting a website or whatever they like but all the page contain the same story just adding game they just do it like some of them doing every hour just put the same story and this is a picture of them still sexy checks and what if like like I mention what if they after they get the elbow collection after like certain people like that page they can sell it for example this is sear a website and find some people [Music] selling their page so they basically a s f page like 30 pages with a s likes so each of them like a 15

bucks you can contact him like write down the Nam scap names you can just contact him he got like a 30 pages already and uh this guy have much more lags and uh the even selling post like in the bottom I'm not sure you can read it like a $15 dollar Propst and $20 for image share and we did find uh this guy selling an image share which is a social engine soci engineering uh spine scam so like the the if you click the link you're going to go to a officient Facebook web page and uh it's like a Chrome extension but with is the code contact me _ FW FB so it's very classic heway to write

code right and uh who like your page like uh you have many likes and do you know who like your page unfortunately there's no uh API for you to easily to get a the list of people who like your page so on one way is protect regular users but on the other way also Pro protect this fake profiles because nobody knows it unless Facebook or until you ask everybody do you like my page do you like my page one billion user for Facebook okay go ahead ask so that's about it so take a real point for this story like others don't follow these games to game more friends and don't buy a fake face a fake

f Facebook fan page and since most of them may robots and don't get taken by social un everybody knows that like you don't click a link until you very sure where it goes to and especially for like button P special attention final summary for Facebook and uh it's like point is that creating fake identity C creating fake account on Facebook is making money maybe not for you but for Facebook at least since most of social platform are valued by the number active users on their platform right for Twitter so like I mentioned the highest sales can reach to $1,800 a day and all these things like all I mentioned today like about fake identity on the social platform is

fundamentally destroy the trust model right you like me I like you exchange the the value or you buy some fake followers so just fundamental D the trust model just real relationship between people in this Society it's just all about money if you keep growing then maybe I don't know 10% 20% of this relationship are fake all based on money so either you want to join this business right $800 a day or you want to step up to stop it so just telling people with uh just check your friend to see if the year B fake followers and then give some warnings or you if you cannot defeat them everybody just join their business okay $1800 a day

okay right so so how about how count this s in your Tweet or fake account uh that's will be on your you your future talk about more Tech stuff so how to cons them there's some ho to to do that but uh follow us back networks and then check out website and uh to see more stories and one more last thing is like we have a free uh social profile scan card of profile protector so you can just subscribe because uh install and it can scan your profile and say some malicious links it's free that's it thank you everybody all right thank you got a question

yes uh no no it's like this fake account not controlled by by me oh it's just like a we brought them we we pay money and B them like it's just they just follow us that's it yeah sir yeah it's there uh permission to put something or do anything

yeah pretty much yes because people who ask a question I can give a t-shirt right okay yes

F no no no uh right now like uh we just tracking them yeah yes yeah yes okay all anybody want more t-shirt I'm left-handed so yeah