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An analysis of fake social media engagement services

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dc.affiliation.dptoUC3M. Departamento de Informáticaes
dc.affiliation.grupoinvUC3M. Grupo de Investigación: COSEC (Computer SECurity Lab)es
dc.contributor.authorNevado Catalán, David
dc.contributor.authorPastrana Portillo, Sergio
dc.contributor.authorVallina-Rodriguez, Narseo
dc.contributor.authorEstévez Tapiador, Juan Manuel
dc.contributor.funderComunidad de Madrides
dc.contributor.funderEuropean Commissionen
dc.date.accessioned2023-06-14T10:11:12Z
dc.date.available2023-06-14T10:11:12Z
dc.date.issued2023-01-01
dc.description.abstractFake engagement services allow users of online social media and other web platforms to illegitimately increase their online reach and boost their perceived popularity. Driven by socio-economic and even political motivations, the demand for fake engagement services has increased in the last years, which has incentivized the rise of a vast underground market and support infrastructure. Prior research in this area has been limited to the study of the infrastructure used to provide these services (e.g., botnets) and to the development of algorithms to detect and remove fake activity in online targeted platforms. Yet, the platforms in which these services are sold (known as panels) and the underground markets offering these services have not received much research attention. To fill this knowledge gap, this paper studies Social Media Management (SMM) panels, i.e., reselling platforms¿often found in underground forums¿in which a large variety of fake engagement services are offered. By daily crawling 86 representative SMM panels for 4 months, we harvest a dataset with 2.8 M forum entries grouped into 61k different services. This dataset allows us to build a detailed catalog of the services for sale, the platforms they target, and to derive new insights on fake social engagement services and its market. We then perform an economic analysis of fake engagement services and their trading activities by automatically analyzing 7k threads in underground forums. Our analysis reveals a broad range of offered services and levels of customization, where buyers can acquire fake engagement services by selecting features such as the quality of the service, the speed of delivery, the country of origin, and even personal attributes of the fake account (e.g., gender). The price analysis also yields interesting empirical results, showing significant disparities between prices of the same product across different markets. These observations suggest that the market is still undeveloped and sellers do not know the real market value of the services that they offer, leading them to underprice or overprice their services.en
dc.description.sponsorshipThis work was supported by the EU Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program under Grant agreement no. 101021377 (TRUST aWARE ); the Spanish grants ODIO (PID2019-111429RB-C21 and PID2019-111429RB-C22), and the Region of Madrid grant CYNAMON-CM (P2018/TCS-4566), co-financed by European Structural Funds ESF and FEDER.en
dc.format.extent16
dc.identifier.bibliographicCitationNevado Catalán, D., Pastrana, S., Vallina Rodríguez, N., Tapiador, J. (2022). An analysis of fake social media engagement services. Computers & Security, 124, 103013en
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.cose.2022.103013
dc.identifier.publicationtitleComputers and Securityen
dc.identifier.publicationvolume124
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10016/37486
dc.identifier.uxxiAR/0000032477
dc.language.isoeng
dc.publisherElsevieren
dc.relation.projectIDComunidad de Madrid. P2018/TCS-4566es
dc.relation.projectIDGobierno de España. PID2019-111429RB-C21es
dc.relation.projectIDComunidad de Madrid. P2019-111429RB-C22es
dc.relation.projectIDinfo:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/101021377en
dc.relation.projectIDAT-2022
dc.rights©2022 The Author(s).en
dc.rightsAtribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 3.0 España
dc.rights.accessRightsopen accessen
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/
dc.subject.ecienciaInformáticaes
dc.subject.othercybercrimeen
dc.subject.otherfake engagement servicesen
dc.subject.otherfrauden
dc.subject.othersecurity economicsen
dc.subject.othersocial networksen
dc.titleAn analysis of fake social media engagement servicesen
dc.typeresearch article*
dc.type.hasVersionVoR*
dspace.entity.typePublication
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