24 ms·
The fake Facebook profile industry
- qaq 9y agoIs there a plugin that tags fake profiles?
- tantalor 9y agoHow? If a plugin could do that then the site could do that.
- CaptSpify 9y agoThe site has incentives to avoid doing that. A crowd-sourced plugin similar to uBlock's 3rd party filters would probably work way better.
- emodendroket 9y agoMaybe Twitter does but Facebook doesn't. That's why in the article they talk about how scammers are very eager to get the conversation off Facebook before the account is deleted.
- CaptSpify 9y agoYes, FB absolutely does. Their inflated "active user" count is where their money comes from.
- emodendroket 9y agoI think in Facebook's case it has more to do with having highly detailed information about their users, which fakes go against. Anyway, a lot of fake accounts get deleted quickly, as mentioned in the article (and I've observed this myself, as obviously fake profiles I've gotten friend requests from usually end up deleted in a day or two).
- CaptSpify 9y agoAnd a lot of other fake accounts don't get deleted. FB doens't really care about the detailed information about their users, as long as they advertisers keep sending them money. Don't mix up what FB says they want, and what they actually want.
- emodendroket 9y agoOK, but if the information is obviously bogus will advertisers keep paying? I don't think deleting fake accounts is necessarily an easy problem. Particularly when we consider that a false positive is much worse than a false negative as far as user impact goes.
- CaptSpify 9y ago> OK, but if the information is obviously bogus will advertisers keep paying? Apparently yes. It's no secret that FB's numbers are not accurate, but they are still making a ton of money. > I don't think deleting fake accounts is necessarily an easy problem. Particularly when we consider that a false positive is much worse than a false negative as far as user impact goes. Nobody said it was easy. Only that FB is incentivised to do detection poorly. FB doesn't really care about user impact, they only care about profit. If it's not enough user impact to cause a dent in profit, they aren't incentivised to care.
- emodendroket 9y ago> Nobody said it was easy. Only that FB is incentivised to do detection poorly. FB doesn't really care about user impact, they only care about profit. If it's not enough user impact to cause a dent in profit, they aren't incentivised to care. I think you've misunderstood my point (or perhaps glossed over it). From a UX perspective, it's way, way worse to delete a real person's account and tell them they're fake (tons of negative news coverage every time these screw-ups happen) than it is to let a fake account slide. So any technique that errs on the side of being too aggressive they are unlikely to use.
- dannyw 9y agoI find it unbelievable that Facebook doesn't have the fake profile situation under control. Facebook builds an incredibly detailed social graph of every user (and non-user) with a big trail of activity, on and off Facebook. Surely there are signs; surely there are common characteristics, and if this journalist can write such a detailed exposé with only public data, Facebook can do much better.
- qaq 9y agoDoesn't deleting a ton of fake profiles have implications for FB valuation and revenue?
- thisisit 9y agoThey can always go the Twitter way and say they were miscounting user growth during a call where they deliver good revenue: https://www.recode.net/2017/10/26/16527682/twitter-earnings-q3-october-2017-jack-dorsey-twtr https://www.recode.net/2017/10/26/16527682/twitter-earnings-...
- jonwachob91 9y agoI doubt it. User growth is used as a metric to measure future ad revenue. Fake profiles aren't going to generate a lot of revenue from those ads. Facebook would simply need to make a statement about deleting a bunch of fake profiles, but they don't expect revenue to dip. However, that is not the case for a pre-revenue or pre-profitable business. Those startups are dependent on VC funding, they might lie about users and usage to get more funding (see Silicon Valley Season 3). *This is 100% inappropriate and should not be done. You will burn credibility with investors, for your current venture and any future ventures. It's better to shut down a venture and move on, than to lie about your metrics.
- cwkoss 9y agoAlso, if they are knowingly sold ad impressions to bots' eyeballs (seems like they did), they committed fraud.
- hackerguy99 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gumby 9y agoUgh, there is no way to just read the text, you have to scroll from short paragraph to short paragraph, like a fancy tweet storm. Do they even want people to read that thing?
- Joe-Z 9y agoIt's really a horrible experience. Just let us read the goddamn thing and don't spam me with animations!
- gjem97 9y agoCan someone with a longer attention span than me provide a summary? I didn't get far enough to glean what the "scam" is.
- djsumdog 9y agoI kept skimming to the bottom, but unless I missed something, they never actually catch these people and report them to the police do they? Like it looks like they determine two of their real names and then .. nothing?
- feikname 9y agotl;dr: The author discovered the identity of two guys (which were not explicitly disclosed) running a big network of bots that targetted man attracted to young, sometimes underage, women. Those bots would point to video chat services, encouraging the man to masturbate himself while viewing pre-recorded videos of a girl masturbating. Then, the person would be threated to give a ransom or else have the video leaked, with the additional threat that he was masturbating to underage woman sometimes. Fraudulent porn websites stealing credit cards were also shared by the bots network.
- eurticket 9y agofrom above: https://outline.com/vznfxw https://outline.com/vznfxw
- gumby 9y ago
- irishbro 9y agoThe 2010 documentary catfish, and subsequent mtv series, offers an interesting look behind the curtain at the type of people who create fake facebook profiles. It covers a wide variety of reasons for creating them spanning from people who suffer from low self-esteem and confidence issues to not being able to reveal that they are homo-sexual out of fear of their friends and family finding out, just out of pure malice or even in one case creating a fake account story to get the show to pay for flights so they could finally meet face to face. Its crazy some of the lengths people go to keep up the charade and how much evidence certain people will ignore to keep the idea that the person is real alive.
- Harvey-Specter 9y ago> in one case creating a fake account story to get the show to pay for flights so they could finally meet face to face. That's brilliant. I couldn't find anything about this episode on google, but I'm interested to know how the hosts reacted to that.
- irishbro 9y agoIt is season 4 episode 18. Here is a summary of the episode http://www.mtv.com/news/2244348/catfish-fake-victim/ http://www.mtv.com/news/2244348/catfish-fake-victim/ I can't remember the exact reactions but Machine Gun Kelly was a guest host and was not happy about it. I imagine the producers where pretty happy that they got something exciting happening.
- underwoodley 9y agoYou should be aware that this is a very questionable documentary and the makers of the documentary who are now the presenters of the TV show have been credibly accused of faking footage and exploiting the subject. > Some journalists and film critics have cast doubt on the filmmakers motivations. Kyle Buchanan of MovieLine questions why the filmmakers would begin obsessively documenting Nev's online relationship so early on, and argues that it is highly improbable that media-savvy professionals like the Schulmans and Joost would not use the Internet to research Megan and her family before meeting them. Buchanan and others have suggested that the filmmakers likely discovered the fabrications in Wesselman-Pierce's story earlier than is presented in the film and pretended to be fooled only so that they could exploit her story for the documentary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catfish_(film)#Authenticity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catfish_(film)#Authenticity
- have_faith 9y agoWorth reading despite many from HN likely knowing this existed already. What I find interesting is that to me and I assumed a lot of people, fake profiles are very obvious and as such I assumed there were, relatively, easy techniques to deal with them. After working on some twitter marketing campaigns over the years and witnessing the swarming bot networks do their thing I have concluded that they are not dealt with whole heartedly on purpose.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- fiatpandas 9y agoThis... was an unreadable experience. Gratuitous animations, football field sized paragraph widths, proportional/fluid CSS sizing (thought maximizing my browser on a 1080p screen would allow me to see more), bite sized paragraphs interspersed with information-thin graphic inserts, full width graphics that have a larger height than your browser viewport, text swooshing down the screen while you're scrolling because the above graphic is dynamically resizing. I appreciate the desire to experiment with the medium, but it just does a disservice to the content.
- djsumdog 9y agoI agree. It was pretty annoying. So are the new top/bottom footers on Medium. I sometimes open up the inspector and delete those two divs just to read the page, but most of the time I don't bother, give up on the article, and just close the tab. Content should just be content. You shouldn't need Javascript to simply view a page. Even if this was all just CSS tricks, it's still pretty annoying. I mean it's a neat idea. Scrolling animation can be kinda neat if done right, but this totally wasn't. It takes away from the content, which is pretty interesting.
- monk_e_boy 9y ago> I sometimes open up the inspector and delete those two divs just to read the page It's crazy how often I need to do this as well. I remember back in the old days hitting esc would stop all the animations on a page, now you need to inspect + delete those elements. There needs to be some crowd sourced way of doing this, so if you delete an element and I visit the site, the element is gone.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago> There needs to be some crowd sourced way of doing this, so if you delete an element and I visit the site, the element is gone. This is how adblockers work (sort of). We could probably leverage the same tech used for adblockers to make UI blockers, which maintain lists of "bad" UI and remove their tags and scripts. Of course, I find it easier to just not use those websites.
- dineshguna 9y agoI can totally understand that as i was into the same situation earlier
- ensiferum 9y agoHah, how stupid do you need to be to fall into this obvious trap. Let's see... a random cute girl approaches you online and wants to initiate a sexy chat. The chances of this happening for real and not being a scam are about the same as you being a distant cousin to a Nigerian prince who just passed away and left you millions of dollars of inheritance.
- djsumdog 9y agoSpam relies on that 1% return, and it comes from either the lowest, the most ignorant, the most uneducated, .. or potentially the most lonely. That's what's probably the most insidious about this particular type of scam, that they target people who may have already made a series of bad decisions, or who are desperate and alone.
- kroltan 9y agoIt _has_ to be stupid. A non-scammy-looking scam might attract people who would notice any minor inconsistency, thus risking more reports and more time of the scammer wasted interacting with a potentially-failed prospect. Now, only the most gullible, most desperate of people would fall into such "obvious" scams, which means a greater return rate for the effort spent.
- djsumdog 9y agoI think the saddest part of this is that they prey on people. Many of the peeps here on HN can look at a profile and say "spam," so it's hard to imagine the people who can't. The 1% return from SPAM that click on those links, or put in their credit card details. There was a ReplyAll podcast episode where one of the reporters actually tracks down a shop in India; even goes there and talks to people who've worked at a "tech support" places which charges $400 to remove fake viruses they've implanted. I think this is even more insidious because they're preying on people who may be extremely lonely or desperate. When you really think about that, it's really sad. It's either psychopathic or they justify it to themselves in some horrible way like, "These people are losers anyway," or "If we say the girls are underage, then we're only going after sexual predators." .. The same crazy logic used by the Ashley Madison leakers.
- laumars 9y agoI've reported spam accounts to Facebook - in fact I do so whenever I come across one. And on more than one occasion Facebook have closed the ticket claiming the account was legitimate. If some of Facebook's own moderation team cannot differentiate between spam accounts and legitimate ones then what hope is there for others?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- LeifCarrotson 9y agoFacebook's moderation team faces far different incentives and consequences than you when checking if an account is spam. Which is worse - a false positive, or a false negative? Facebook would rather leave 999 false profiles up and not accidentally close 1 genuine profile that just happens to look spammy. From their perspective, ruining someone's Facebook experience by deleting their account is worse than letting everyone else have a slightly worse experience (after all, even those fake profiles are generating ad revenue). In contrast, Youtube is flagging, demonetizing, and three-striking channels left and right, using much more trigger-happy moderation (and even auto-mods) to control videos. They have plenty of content creators, but need to keep both viewers and lawyers happy. Be careful that you know where you stand on these platforms, especially on important things like Amazon AWS accounts.
- throwawayfish 9y agoUsing a throwaway account to keep things private Last year I was "sex-torted" on Facebook but not by a ring of French criminals. Instead, it was by someone I had chatted with on the internet years ago (while we were both still teenagers) She had recently gotten divorced and contacted me after many years away. We spoke about intimate things (I never shared intimate images, though she did) and were getting closer and closer to each other. She eventually asked me for money to cover an expense for her daughter, but I didn't send it fearing I was being scammed. In exchange, she took screengrabs of the most intimate parts of our conversations and shared them to all of my professional contacts via LinkedIn as well as friends , colleagues and family on Facebook. The experience haunts me to this day, I discussed consensual kinky stuff with her and she used this to paint me as a freak and deviant. The only people who understood it were those who had been in a similar situation or those who were in the "lifestyle" as well. Strangely, most of the support I received after the fact were women who have been similarly extorted. Men in my entourage just whispered and snickered. To this day, I still feel shame in certain circles because of what is unsaid. The police have done absolutely nothing even in the face of evidence (reports filed with local police and FBI) but it's simply not a priority. Facebook won't even pull the posts because no intimate images were actually shared and it doesn't technically violate their "guidelines" Net result: I've deleted my social profiles. Every last one of them (and feel better as a result). However, the damage is done and I'm totally still feeling PTSD as a result of the ordeal. I consider myself very tech savvy (engineer, infosec background, on the internet since the early 90's) and able to smell a scam. However, it's really really easy to fall victim to something like this. Be careful.
- jotadambalakiri 9y agoOne of the worst thing about it is that they seemed to have started this not to make money but to have fun and hurt some people.
- scraft 9y ago1. I got told many years ago, that when you get that crazily bad emails, where it claims to be from some official source, but there are spelling mistakes, the return email address is obviously wrong, grammer is terrible, etc. the sort where it is so completely obviously it is a scam - often this is done on purpose, they aren't intereseting >99% of people who can spot a scam, they are interested in the <1% who can't spot it is obviously a problem. Basically they cast a wide net, but when the haul it in, only the whales are found within. At that point, they can use a large amount of resource, per victim, as they know they have a reasonable chance of success. 2. Separately to the above, a reasonable amount of men (perhaps women to? I don't know, I feel like it is more men) will happily look at girls, whether this in a Playboy Magazine in the 50's, looking at girls as the enter a bar in the 90's or whether it is flicking through images of a girl on Facebook/Instagram in the 21st century. Some of these men actually know it is a scam, but don't really care, at the end of the day it's a picture of an attractive girl/woman, they so they look through. Maybe they even add that profile as a friend, as they don't mind having the pictures appearing naturally in their news feed. I don't know whether many (any?) of this group of people end up getting scammed. Perhaps somehow overtime, they get convinced the account isn't fake, or perhaps they still think it is fake but agree to go onto a video chat and then are convinced on there, or perhaps they are trying to catch the scammer out, but end up being caught out themselves.
- astura 9y agoSee Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They are From Nigeria?: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-nigerian-scammers-say-they-are-from-nigeria/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-...
- mosselman 9y agoInteresting link, thanks. It is a numbers game really and a logical one too; why spend time where you have to tread carefully when you can filter out the savvy targets.
- djsumdog 9y agoI remember that post. I also remember when I first learned that Nigerian scammers are actually for Nigeria. I thought for sure they'd pick a different country than their actual one.
- alexandre_m 9y ago"One of them said that she made 10,000 euros ($14,800 CDN) in a single month by “sharing links on Facebook.” She also claimed that the network was based in France, Spain and Italy. Both women abruptly ended all communication with us after initially agreeing to an interview." I'd rather suspect those are false confessions and more an attempt to attract new members in this scheme network who hope to make huge amount of money.
- willvarfar 9y agoThe article explores sextortion, but doesn't ponder too deeply whats going on the with sharing images of disabled people etc. Perhaps people who respond sympathetically are also easy marks for sob story and pleading for money?
- Mz 9y agoOff the cuff opinion: Sex has a strong emotional component. People who are "sexually needy" are often really emotionally needy and emotionally unhealthy. They are attracted to things with a strong emotional component, but low commitment. Liking pics of people who have cancer or whatever fits those criteria. The people gushing at pathetic photos of that sort are (probably) more likely than others to also be vulnerable to sextortion. I am handicapped and had a lengthy medical crisis. Lots of people wanted me to be their big feels hit for the day while not actually giving a flying fuck about my welfare. Trying to get people to invest two nanoseconds in actually being helpful instead of merely using me as some emotional drug was a huge uphill battle. A good filter for who to not waste my time on is folks who seek me out because I have a disability (or other sob story) and they have such big feels about it. These are always leeches who cannot respect me as a person and will only ever talk to me to meet their emotional needs. It's really sick stuff.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- emodendroket 9y agoIt seemed like it was just a way to get a lot of followers so that the sexual stuff was seen by more people.
- denisehilton 9y agoIt's about time Facebook should start taking action against fake profile. They should make use of AI to separate them out.
- CaptSpify 9y agoThey have every incentive to do the opposite though. Fake profiles still count towards ad-revenue because advertisers aren't calling Facebook out on their bullshit.
- sddfd 9y agoSounds like a competitor of Facebook should do it then..
- zanny 9y agoYou can't compete with mindshare on that scale. The network effects are ludicrous. People have made generally better products than Facebook for years that all wither because they don't have a billion people and everyone you already know on them. If Facebook were using an open protocol like Ostatus anyone could make a peer network that is better than Facebook and actually compete, but their userbase is entirely locked into their platform. On purpose, of course, thats why investors value FB so highly. Its entirely against their interests to enable competition.
- rdruxn 9y agolol - what competitor?
- Tsagadai 9y agoMore to that I think some advertisers benefit from a known gullible community. It would be quite easy (and unethical) for someone to make money out of targeted ads piggybacking on this sort of network.
- prostoalex 9y ago> Fake profiles still count towards ad-revenue How? Unless the fake profiles manage to generate significant amount of ad fraud along the way, the advertisers still end up paying for actions, not impressions. Why would an operator of a fraudulent network click on ads, sign up for third-party newsletters, install promoted mobile apps or do whatever else the dominant ad unit in his/her feed would promote?
- grownseed 9y agoFacebook recently started sending me notifications that somebody unknown was trying to log into my account, that they'd temporarily blocked it, and later re-enabled it. The emails actually come from Facebook, the problem is that the email address they're contacting me on is one I've never used for Facebook. The email contains a link to log into Facebook to "fix" the situation, but I obviously can't log in. The other link in the email is to unsubscribe from their notifications, but not from Facebook. There is absolutely no way for me to say "yes, this is my email address, and no, it should not be tied to Facebook in any way". There is also no way for me to check what Facebook account is supposedly attached to this email. This feels incredibly underhanded, it's either "join Facebook, or risk having somebody steal an account you never created". So back to the point of the article, Facebook is at the very least passively encouraging this fake profile stuff, and the cynic in me thinks it might not be that passive...
- cwkoss 9y agoTry forgot password?
- everybodyknows 9y agoDoesn't this mean that someone at one time had access to your Email account at one time, in order to register a Facebook account with it? I would ask myself how much of my email history might have been compromised.
- EthereumDublin 9y agoWhat do you do with the real profiles, that are fake too? Too many people just present on Facebook what they perceive to be their best self.
- agumonkey 9y agoSociety has a tiny part in this, it seems it's as bad to be seen masturbating on a computer than threaten people to ruin their lives for money. I an employee of mine was caught in this, I'd laugh it off faster than it takes to say it. But I'd hammer down hard on the scammers.
- WilsonPhillips 9y agoIs this something that the blockchain could help with? Seems to me that a scalable method of authentication would be a real asset to solving the problem.
- emodendroket 9y agoWhat? How?
- AndrewStephens 9y ago> Is this something that the blockchain could help with? The answer to every problem isn't "blockchain". Sometimes it is "Rust". And, difficult as it may be to believe, sometimes the problem has no technical solution at all. Hold on for one more day and things will go your way.
- emodendroket 9y agoIf those don't cut it try Big Data.
- MarkPNeyer 9y agoAll of the problems with fake profiles are fixable if we just use the social graph. It drives me nuts that this a problem. I have a solution, which i'll share here. I'm sharing it because i hope SOMEONE can build this or share it with someone at a high level at FB or twitter. I have a mortgage in silicon valley and a young child, so i'm not in a position to take the time and risk to do this. But i really desperately want to see it in the world. All we have to do is use the social graph to verify each other, and follow 'verified' edges to determine trust in a third party. People can just tell fb or twitter 'yes i know this account', and that's all we really need. If I can't follow any 'yes i know this person edges' to a remote account, don't let me interact with that account. Shadowban them. It's THAT simple. This technique stops bots and it stops trolling by fake remote accounts. If someone claims "i know all these fake accounts", then we ban that person, for creating all the fake accounts. Fake accounts are easily identified after the fact; when no real person pays any price, they'll keep getting created. Yes it has the downside of temporarily slowing adoption. That's the main reason imagine twitter and FB haven't done this. They think us being harassed is less important than onboarding new people. https://s3.neyer.me/respect-matrix-slides.pdf https://s3.neyer.me/respect-matrix-slides.pdf
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wepple 9y agoI don’t see this working. Too many people on Facebook accept friend requests from unknown people already for it to work. I guess you could have some kind of “have you actually met this person in real life” test, but that’s an annoying friction, and people seem to enjoy inflating “friends” regardless.
- cwkoss 9y agoAlso breaks as soon as anyone in your graph gets their password stolen.
- prostoalex 9y agoOut-of-band verifications are kinda cumbersome in real life. Let’s say a profile claiming to be your college friend, or a coworker from three jobs ago sends you a friend request on Facebook - will you really go out of your way to email/call/visit them to verify the account is theirs and not an impostor’s?
- mkoryak 9y agoLately I have been getting contacted by random 'women' on gtalk who 'just want to be friends'. I usually just block them but last week I decided to play along. Long story short: they wanted me to cam with them and to see my picture. I sent them a link to non-existent page on my domain and logged their IP. I confronted them with their IP and the fact that they were in Nigeria and not south Carolina. The account was immediately deleted.
- cm2187 9y agoSkype has that a lot too.
- dudus 9y agoI had one contacting me on my Playstation messager account. I didn't even know that was a thing to be honest.... Same story about cam.... "She" wanted to go on cam with me.... sounded more like a bot. I didn't follow through so I don't know what was the final plan.
- TylerE 9y agoBlackmail, they get a dick pic and threaten to send it to all your contacts unless you pay up.
- King-Aaron 9y ago"Hey I can't messsage here but talk to me on Kik www.kik.com etc"
- mkoryak 9y agofollow up: I have not been contacted by any more friendly 'women' since this happened
- tmpz22 9y agoThrowaway to share a valuable perspective. My dad is a chronic target for scammers, and falls for them at a rate where I can only think it intentional on some level. He'll allow fake MSPs to install programs as root, on the same machine he does banking and legal on. He'll call numbers when strange javascript alerts tell him he has a virus. He'll then pay people to "remove" said malware, giving them full access to the machine via teamviewer etc. I've managed to limit his internet usage to an iPad and a chromebook - but as mentioned above that does little good. He is extremely proud and talking to him is useless. A good chunk of these events come while browsing porn, which he refuses to admit. I feel hopeless and am in the process of separating any financial connections with my mother for fear I'll become a victim. My mother has been saving cash for years to insulate herself (my dad also refuses to write a will - but thats another problem entirely). I know a major event is coming soon. While I'm fairly certain his porn usage is tame, all it would take is a fake $THAT_ACTRESS_WAS_ACTUALLY_17_WE_WILL_REPORT_TO_FBI email and he could probably be extorted for everything he has. I don't know what to do honestly. This is a real threat to millions of Americans and it seems there is no solution.
- jjtheblunt 9y agoHow about don't look at questionable sites, as a solution?
- roganartu 9y agoThat is the porn-equivalent of suggesting that abstinence is the solution to teen pregnancy. It may be technically correct insofar as abstinence obviously works for those that rigorously follow it, but fails to account for the simple fact that teenagers have sex regardless of whether they are told not to. Shaming porn usage does nothing to reduce its prevalence and just encourages users to hide and deny, hence your suggestion is not productive.
- pjc50 9y ago> falls for them at a rate where I can only think it intentional on some level > extremely proud and talking to him is useless This is terrible, and I can't think how I'd cope with it :(
- rvkn 9y agoI'm glad others are digging into this. It's a fairly common problem. I had to deal with my with my deceased friend's account being hijacked by a 'bait' account a few months ago. Facebook seemed fairly indifferent to the issue. Wrote about the process here: https://medium.com/@vonkunesnewton/facebook-parasite-the-second-death-of-john-ezzard-2f3744f8a070 https://medium.com/@vonkunesnewton/facebook-parasite-the-sec...
- dd36 9y agoThey’ve gotta keep increasing those gross margins.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoI find it amusing and sad at the same time when I get targeted with these sorts of things. Amusing because they seem so obviously 'honey traps' of one form or another, and sad because I'm sure there are many people that fall for them (this article just confirms that suspicion). I had hoped they would have done a bit of work to track the money flow in these scams. Clearly there is an opportunity here to disrupt that cash flow since most use electronic payment providers with at least some level of tracking. I want the electronic equivalent of 'marked bills' which have mandatory reporting requirements at all financial institutions that process them.
- cwkoss 9y agoThis is why Facebook's new Non Consensual Image Program seems like a really bad idea. The technical implementation is fine, seems reasonable, only concern is that a human has to screen every image. The real problem is that internet users have learned "Anything you upload to the internet is as good as public." Facebook is trying to teach people a new precedent: "Images uploaded to facebook in the right way will REMOVE images from the public". People are going to fail to read the fine print, and thousands will be phished for nudes through facebook with similar schemes.
- HenryBemis 9y agoThank you for sharing this investigation. Sometimes when I warn my friends and family about oversharing online, and the "dangers of social media" (on-the-internet-nobody-knows-you're-a-dog 1993 cartoon) they think I'm paranoid. This is a very good case study for all social media users to understand.
- cm2187 9y agoI deleted my facebook app since half of the posts in my feed were fake anyway. Facebook disguises ads as friend's share and likes, even when it is obvious that a particular friend would never like a corporate page. They even pushed the bad taste by making my deceased father (who's account we didn't think to delete) like things after he passed. So if you add fake profiles to that... As a note, I hadn't received an email from facebook since pretty much I registered many years ago. Since I deleted the app a few weeks ago, facebook started spamming my email with notifications. And they use this trick that is really a new low, they create a thousand different kinds of mailing list so that every time you unsubscribe from one, you still receive new spam because it's "another" mailing list.
- exodust 9y agoEven worse, Facebook seems to allow people to open an account using someone else's email address. I've never had a FB account yet occasionally I get emails from 'facebookmail.com' addressing me by a woman's name (I'm a man) and pestering me with friend suggestions of people I've never heard of. My email has never been compromised, yet Facebook spams it with the assumption I'm part of their network. I will never join their pile of shit spam den, and have never clicked on anything in the emails they send.
- jaaames 9y agoHow does the SEC not crack down on Facebook misleading investors around the number of "active" users?
- prostoalex 9y agoIt’s a secondary metric and investors only carry about the revenue/profit. (Look at Snap, whose user count is growing, and stock price is not). And since FB advertisers are paying for engagement, not impressions, the amount of ad fraud is likely insignificant.
- wyclif 9y agoIronically, if you try sharing this piece on social media you'll see that their graphic designer could spell neither "temptation" nor "extortion" correctly. In Canada! Yikes!
- philippoi 9y agoWere you looking at the French text portions? This reads like a study conducted and first published in French and then translated into English. Where I could find "extorsion" the context was French.
- jerianasmith 9y agoThis is what technology is - a double edged weapon. Use it wisely.
- underlines 9y agoTwo stories that I remember about this: 1. Sextortion scam for personal gain Back in 2002 i was using MSN Messenger as a teenager, being like 17yo and full of testosterone, I accepted any girl wanting to share intimate details with me. There was one local girl, chatting with me for 2 years, but always had excused for not opening her cam. I was sharing intimate details while being on cam, but finally stopped, as she never wanted to meet me, despite living 20km away. She always had excuses. Two years later, I was dipping again into script kiddie stuff and trying out some trojan generators, combining it with an exe cryptor to make it undetectable for the early anti-virus tools. I contacted that girl again, and told her I had some new videos of my holidays. Sent it to her (holiday-in-france.avi.exe) and two mins later I was on "her" PC. Turns out it's a local guy, 5 years older than me, having like 100 folders named after local boys, where he kept videos, screen grabs and photos neatly organized. Most of them underage. Fortunately I found a word document with his resumee, even with a photo of him. I reported that guy to the feds the same day. -- 2. Sextortion with the wrong guy Years later I migrated to an asian country. I now speak the local language and have a second Facebook and Skype profile that I only use for local contacts here, that I barely know and who are not family, friends or business contacts. Every now and then some fake russian/eastern european girls try to add me on Skype or Facebook randomly. This time those girls are real, they even start a real webcam conversation. But this time I'm prepared, being interested in infosec and online since the early 90ies and prepared because I was scammed before (see story 1.). Those girls quickly start skype video calls, where they try to scam guys. Me, knowing this scam for years, had a laugh and continued the video chat, also sharing intimate details with them, and who says no to watch a beautiful girl undress herself and sharing her sexual preferences? After usually 20-30 minutes of showing off on the camera, asking my sexual preferences and begging to add me on Facebook, they will change the tone of the conversion and try to blackmail me. Since I knew the scam, I was laughing and telling them, that my whole online presence is fake and all the profiles they have from me are filled with fake friends. They swore at me and immediately blocked me on Skype and Facebook. Happened several times.