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According to their Facebook profiles, Mandy Barnes , Jasmine Wilson, May Price and Mindy Bennett have a lot in common.So do Meredith Gonzales, Sonja Watson, Lucia Long and MeredithBaker. They are all around the same age (early 20s) and attractive, butnot in a supermodel kind of way. They are all Facebook friends,despite living in different areas of the country and attendingdifferent schools. Their favorite sport is, somewhat inexplicably,cricket. Their favorite movie is the even more obscure Arab Spring Wedding. They have all posted exactly three Facebook photos, and they allhave the same favorite quotation. But the biggest thing they have in common is that they re all fakeaccounts, created by the same bot-scammer to commit fraud. Look at any of these profiles by themselves and you probablywouldn t stop to think twice about them. (Unless you noticed thatbit about 20-something American gals liking cricket really, doesanyone outside the UK and its former colonies enjoy cricket?) Lookat more than a couple in a row, though, or two of them side byside, and the ruse becomes obvious. Last year I wrote about a experiment conducted by researchers atthe University of British Columbia in which they created a network of about 100 Facebook bots to see how many real people they could get to friend them. Theresearchers easily evaded Facebook s defenses and convincedthousands of Facebook users to friend their lifeless creations.Using photos of pretty women increased the success ratesignificantly. It appears the zombie social networks have escaped from the lab andare now staggering around in the wild. There is a thriving blackmarket in fake Facebook accounts, as well as in software that letsyou create your own. Want a generic account that Facebook hasn t verified? They runfrom 6 to 20 cents apiece. If you want a PVA a phone verifiedaccount for which Facebook has sent a code via text message to aphone, requiring a human to log into Facebook and enter that code-- the prices start at $1.50 per account. And it s not justFacebook; Twitter, G+, AOL, iTunes, Craigslist all have their own markets for faux personae . I can t decide what s more shocking: how lazy the scammers are,or how inept Facebook is in ferretting them out. Really, these guysare hardly rocket scientists. The scammers take a generic profile,change a handful of details, and post it to Facebook. Often timesthey don t even bother changing the names. Sometimes they reusethe same photographs for different profiles. Sometimes they use aman s name and a woman s picture, or vice versa. And thatfavorite quotation that keeps popping up everywhere? It seither Hi or Hello followed by a series of ellipses. These guys aren t even trying. And yet it doesn t matter. Theycreate these profiles all around the same time, using 95 percent ofthe same data, and Facebook doesn t blink. So much for thatvaunted Immune System Facebook likes to boast about. Mindy, Mandy, May, et al have only been live on Facebook for abouta week. But I found a second nest of bots that have been operatingsince March. Collectively this last group has Liked the same listof nearly 1000 pages. I have no idea how many bots are operating inthis particular nest, but I wouldn t be surprised if it numberedin the thousands. It s a form of blackhat SEO called Like fraud. And while thismay not be a huge concern for the average user, it is seriously badnews for Facebook and its dreams of creating a new advertisingsystem based on what people Like. If the the world s biggestsocial network can be gamed this easily using fake profiles, thennothing on it can be trusted. If a scammer can sell Likes forless than a penny apiece, then they are essentially worthless both to users like you and me, and to the advertisers Facebook isbanking on. There is more to this story. Stay tuned for news on the ways thesebots operate in a future post. Got a question about social media? TY4NS blogger Dan Tynan may have the answer (and if not, he ll make something up). Visithis snarky, occasionally NSFW blog eSarcasm or follow him on Twitter: @tynanwrites . For the latest IT news, analysis and how-to s, follow ITworld on Twitter and Facebook . I am an expert from miningmonorail.com, while we provides the quality product, such as China Monorail Track Switch , Light Monorail Manufacturer, Industrial Monorail Systems,and more.
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