Three Pakistani researchers—Zubair Shafiq, Shehroze Farooqui from University of Iowa, Fareed Zafar from Lahore University of Management and Sciences (LUMS) in conjunction with Nektarios Leontiadis of Facebook—have discovered a scam which permits users to generate millions of fake ‘likes’ on Facebook.
The research paper found a thriving ecosystem of ‘collusion networks’ being managed by spammers, which were able to utilise over one million Facebook compromised accounts to generate as many as 100 million fake ‘likes’ during 2015-16.
It is common practice for websites to sell likes, comments and increase page visits for Facebook; however, this discovery uses legitimate applications to generate likes and make comments on pages and posts.
Terming them as “collusion networks” in the research paper, such a huge number of likes generated can elevate a post’s status in Facebook’s algorithm, which will result in more people seeing and viewing such posts.
Moreover, these scammers are using third-party applications like ‘Spotify’ and ‘iMovie’ to access a user’s Facebook account, which then allows the automating process to kick-in and generate thousands of likes in a matter of minutes, as opposed to the manual one, whose outcome resulted in much lesser likes.
In a comment to a US publication, Zubair Shafiq said, “When you become part of this network, you can say ‘give me likes on this post’ and as soon as you request it, you get thousands of likes on a specific post.”
One of the websites listed in the research paper named djliker.com can be utilised for increasing visits to Facebook pages, increasing likes and comments too.