Hordes of Fake Users Scamming Social Media, eCommerce Sites
Found on eWEEK on Sunday, 03 July 2016
Why do tech companies and other startups create fake users? As with Pied Piper, one reason is to convince real users that a Web-based service is popular and, therefore, more appealing.
Amazon recently filed lawsuits against three sellers for using sock puppet accounts to post fake reviews. (They posed as consumers but were in fact "reviewing" their own products. And these sellers were allegedly prolific—some 30 to 45 percent of the companies' reviews were fake.
According to one report, about 8 percent of presidential candidate Donald Trump and 7 percent of Hillary Clinton's Twitter followers are fake accounts. That estimate is conservative—some reports say the majority of the candidates' social media followers are fake.
Shocking news? No. That should not surprise anybody who has spent more than 5 minutes online. Often sockpuppets are easy to spot, especially on sites where you can buy something. So it is only logical to assume that apart from those bad puppets there are more better ones. In times where likes, views and followers are everything, people stopped caring about who truly is behind those numbers.