
The fake Facebook profile industry - imartin2k
http://ici.radio-canada.ca/special/sextorsion/en/index.html
======
throwawayfish
Using 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.

~~~
abtom
This is something that could have happened to anyone. Not just because of
misplaced trust in an online partner but because it's easy to create fake
screenshots of conversations using Photoshop or simply Inspect Element.

I'm interested in how you mitigated the damage once the post was published. A
good strategy might have been to simply discredit it as being
fake/photoshopped along with a small tutorial showing how easy it is to create
(most aren't tech savvy enough to understand this already).

True you'd be lying, but this is certainly not below the level of someone
who's falsely accusing you.

~~~
sillysaurus3
It's shocking how easy it is to become a liar without missing a beat.

If they slipped and someone caught them lying, it would become exponentially
worse. Bad idea.

But they should be proud of their sexuality. Whether it's BDSM or hotwifing or
whatever strange kink, who cares? It's the same as shaming someone for being
gay.

I dislike that we have to be so Victorian about sex. It's the social climate
we live in, but... Why?

There are also broader implications: Whenever we discredit the truth, we're
contributing to how easy it is to manufacture fake news. There's a certain
piece of potentially fake news I've been dying to bring up. It had a big
impact on me, and then I realized it might be fake. But in an era when the
truth is so easy to distort, what should you believe?

~~~
Spearchucker
_" I dislike that we have to be so Victorian about sex. It's the social
climate we live in, but... Why?"_

It's religion. It teaches roughly 4 bn† people that sex is dirty, that
nakedness is shameful, and that talking about it's acts and/or requisite body
parts is taboo.

† According to Wikipedia 2.4 billion Christians, and 1.6 billion Muslims.

~~~
vlehto
If that was true, you should see significant differences between religions.
And at the same time very little differences within religions.

That does not seem to hold. Looks like religions just tend to echo some sort
of natural chastity. And that is hardly surprising given how recent things
religions are and how old thins STDs are.

"Oh you have tingling feeling in your weewee, it's wrath of God!" and you just
explained one thing away while giving more credibility to the god thing your
trying to promote.

~~~
Spearchucker
_If that was true, you should see significant differences between religions.
And at the same time very little differences within religions._

Not following you. The Decalogue exists in Judaism, Christianity and in Islam.
The Decalogue, and marriage, are indeed extremely recent social constructs.

I'm not promoting religion - I despise any form of it. I merely posit religion
as being the source of humanity's prudishness (something the rest of nature
does not share).

~~~
jerf
"I merely posit religion as being the source of humanity's prudishness
(something the rest of nature does not share)."

Nature as a whole may not, but there are species even more monogamous than we
are out there. I've sort of played a game of "construct an even remotely
sensible sexual strategy no species uses" and so far I've come up empty;
everything you can think of, including the closest equivalent to
"prudishness", is used out there.

On that note, the "missing link" for you is probably that sex and reproduction
are inextricably linked for all non-humans, and for all humans up until _very_
recently. Hangups about sex are not hangups about sex; to put it in quite
atheistic terms, they are hangups about whose selfish genes get to win out
over whose. Start looking at it that way and it makes a lot more sense than
your current model, probably.

Our current reproductive strategies are currently in total chaos because of
the extremely _recent_ introduction of effective birth control and I see
little reason to believe that we have found the best response to that in what
is still effectively just one generation, nor that our current responses will
be stable over the generations, because the shock is simply too recent in
generational terms. (Not to mention all the near-in-generational-term shocks
that may be yet to come, including but not limited to: Effective male-directed
birth control, effective sex robots for males, technology to permit cloning
without loss, technology to edit genes in eggs or sperm, technology to permit
taking children to term out of a biological womb, and in the craziest case,
technology to completely digitize people and make biology essentially
irrelevant.) In particular, it does not seem particularly clear to me that the
idea that "sex is 100% just sex and nobody should be ashamed about anything as
long as it is consensual" is going to win out, because that crowd tends to use
birth control of one form or another, and therefore, in the next several
generations can be expected to be bred out. By some definitions of morality it
may well be moral, but it won't be stable.

------
tmpz22
Throwaway 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.

~~~
trifidpaw
Have you considered running OpenWRT / LEDE or a pi-hole ([https://pi-
hole.net/](https://pi-hole.net/)) to block adverts / known websites where such
scams occur at a network level?

(There are publicly available lists of known botnet / scam IP's)

~~~
wingworks
I've use OpenDNS at my parents house to help block most of the worst scams,
works pretty well.

~~~
username223
So far I have just installed Ghostery for my parents, since it doesn't break
most sites, and they are sharp and AFAIK don't visit sketchy sites. But I have
seen one grandfather turned into a Fox Geezer and ripped off by scammers,
despite his children trying to clue him in, so I suspect I will have to do
something more aggressive at some point in the future. Thankfully, I think
they have enough distrust of humanity that I should have no problem installing
a firewall.

Also, they thankfully show no interest in social networks.

------
scraft
1\. 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
See Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They are From Nigeria?:
[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-
do-...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-nigerian-
scammers-say-they-are-from-nigeria/)

~~~
djsumdog
I 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.

------
djsumdog
I 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
I'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?

~~~
LeifCarrotson
Facebook'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.

~~~
anpat
I am sure I will sound naive to you but what do you mean by AWS accounts here?

~~~
LeifCarrotson
Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing service which, to put it briefly,
allows you to run websites. You could have a physical server rack in a
datacenter near you, or spin up some servers on AWS (or Google Cloud, or
Azure).

A lot of very large companies use it, including a lot of Fortune 500s for
their ordinary company websites, as well as major web apps like Netflix,
Reddit, Pinterest, Spotify, etc. And of course Amazon itself.

Now, those listed sites _probably_ would get a call if something were to
happen, but too many HN startups are running on AWS accounts linked to the
founder's gmail and personal shopping account. Imagine if a dispute over a
return of some counterfeit junk bought on Amazon by some CTO suddenly took
down all of Netflix...

------
dannyw
I 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.

~~~
pohl
Why would they scuttle their own engagement metrics by pruning out highly-
engaged segments of the social network, though?

~~~
Feniks
This.

Facebook will only remove the accounts that give them too much (media)
trouble.

~~~
metalliqaz
Yeah, but surely they must understand (especially after their uncomfortable
turn in front of a congressional committee) that if they keep up the bullshit
for too long they are going to find themselves regulated.

There may be no immediate financial incentive, but I'll bet good money that
they fear a future of regulatory compliance.

Edited for spelling.

------
alexandre_m
"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.

------
have_faith
Worth 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.

------
mkoryak
Lately 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.

~~~
dudus
I 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
Blackmail, they get a dick pic and threaten to send it to all your contacts
unless you pay up.

------
cm2187
I 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
Even 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.

~~~
avenius
To be fair this sounds more like phishing. I would assume emails from facebook
came from the facebook.com domain.

~~~
exodust
I thought that too but after looking it up FB email does indeed come from
facebookmail.com

------
cwkoss
This 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.

------
irishbro
The 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.

~~~
underwoodley
You 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)

~~~
DanBC
> You should be aware that this is a very questionable documentary

Your links only talk about the film makers; the phenomenon of cat-fishing is
real.

------
MarkPNeyer
All 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)

~~~
wepple
I 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
Also breaks as soon as anyone in your graph gets their password stolen.

------
grownseed
Facebook 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...

~~~
everybodyknows
Doesn'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.

------
ChuckMcM
I 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.

------
rvkn
I'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-sec...](https://medium.com/@vonkunesnewton/facebook-parasite-the-
second-death-of-john-ezzard-2f3744f8a070)

~~~
dd36
They’ve gotta keep increasing those gross margins.

------
underlines
Two 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.

------
willvarfar
The 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
Off 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.

------
jotadambalakiri
One 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.

------
HenryBemis
Thank 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.

------
wyclif
Ironically, 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
Were 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.

------
qaq
Is there a plugin that tags fake profiles?

~~~
tantalor
How? If a plugin could do that then the site could do that.

~~~
CaptSpify
The site has incentives to avoid doing that. A crowd-sourced plugin similar to
uBlock's 3rd party filters would probably work way better.

~~~
emodendroket
Maybe 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
Yes, FB absolutely does. Their inflated "active user" count is where their
money comes from.

~~~
emodendroket
I 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
And 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
OK, 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
> 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
> 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.

------
jaaames
How does the SEC not crack down on Facebook misleading investors around the
number of "active" users?

~~~
prostoalex
It’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.

------
fiatpandas
This... 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
I 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
> 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
> 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.

~~~
mpeg
In fact you can just right click an element and block it with most desktop ad-
blockers.

------
gumby
Ugh, 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?

~~~
gjem97
Can someone with a longer attention span than me provide a summary? I didn't
get far enough to glean what the "scam" is.

~~~
eurticket
from above: [https://outline.com/vznfxw](https://outline.com/vznfxw)

~~~
gumby
Thanks, that's a useful site!

------
denisehilton
It's about time Facebook should start taking action against fake profile. They
should make use of AI to separate them out.

~~~
CaptSpify
They 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
Sounds like a competitor of Facebook should do it then..

~~~
zanny
You 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.

------
jerianasmith
This is what technology is - a double edged weapon. Use it wisely.

------
EthereumDublin
What 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.

------
ensiferum
Hah, 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
Spam 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.

~~~
srtjstjsj
> that they target people who may have already made a series of bad decisions,
> or who are desperate and alone.

like alcohol, casinos+lotteries, and free-to-play games with microtransactions

~~~
gadlash
Are you comparing sextortionists to EA? I agree.

------
dineshguna
I can totally understand that as i was into the same situation earlier

------
WilsonPhillips
Is 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.

~~~
AndrewStephens
> 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
If those don't cut it try Big Data.

