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Friday, December 12, 2014

https://blog.barracuda.com/










The
Twitter
Underground
Economy:
A
Blooming
Business

Posted by in Anti-Spam, Current Events, Social Networking, Statistics | Comments Off
Aug
03,
12The Twitter Underground Economy: A Blooming Business

– A study on Dealers, Abusers and fake Twitter
Accounts

by Jason Ding, Research Scientist

Many people dream of becoming popular or famous, and Twitter provides an
outlet to make this possible. Most Twitter users try the standard way to get
popular and gain followers: constantly tweet funny quotes or comments, discuss
breaking events, or disclose information that many people want (like Guy Adams did).
However, some Twitter users look for unusual ways to make themselves appear more
desirable and become popular faster. One of these ways is buying Twitter
followers, which right or wrong, is a significantly growing trend.

At Barracuda Labs, we consistently find and study fake profiles on social
media platforms (reference our study on Facebook Fake Profiles at http://barracudalabs.com/fbinfographic/)
in order to better protect our 150,000 customers from being phished or harmed.
For the past 75 days, we have been investigating the business of trading Twitter
followers on eBay and other websites searched from Google. As it turns out, this
underground economy on Twitter is blooming! The results show that this Twitter
business is growing very fast to form a series of underground markets.

For quick snapshot, please refer to our most recent infographic, The Underground
Economy of Buying Twitter Followers at http://barracudalabs.com/underground/.

The Study

As part of this study, beginning in May 2012, our team set up three Twitter
accounts and purchased between 20,000 and 70,000 Twitter followers for each of
them from eBay and another website searched from Google. After collecting these
followers’ profiles via Twitter API, as well as additional information from eBay
sellers and Google search results, we found many interesting highlights of this
business, summarized as follows  into 3 categories.

Dealers (those users who create fake accounts and sell
followings):

  • There are 20 eBay sellers and 58 websites (within top 100 returns of
    searching “buy twitter followers” in Google) where people can buy (fake)
    followers
  • Twitter username is used to purchase, no authentication is required
  • The average price of buying 1000 followers is $18
  • A Dealer can control as many as ~150,000 or more Twitter followers (contact
    @kashifrox)
  • A Dealer can earn as much as $800/day for 7 weeks of selling followings if
    they can control  20,000 fake accounts (estimated on several random fake
    accounts reaching 2000 followings in 7 weeks and assume each following involved
    a minimum $20 purchase)
  • In addition to selling followings from these fake accounts, there are
    numerous opportunities for expansion into other services: selling
    tweets/re-tweets to earn additional profits







twitter-account-selling-followers-150K-1

Figure 1: A dealer trying to sell Twitter
followers for up to 150,000
Abusers (those users who bought followers (most of which are
fake) in order to look more popular or to use the accounts for selling ads):

  • There were 11,283 Abusers identified (each has at least 470 fake followers;
    magic number 470 is explained later, hint: it is related to @GregoryDEvans)
  • The average Abuser has 48,885 followers
  • 53% of Abusers have 4,000-26,000 followers
  • 75% of abusers have set a URL in their profiles (compared to 31% for random
    Twitter users)





twitter-dist-followers-for-abusers-4k-26k-1-1024x414

Figure 2: The distribution of number of followers
for 11,283 Abusers
Fake Accounts (created by dealers for selling followings or
tweets business):

  • There were 72,212 unique fake accounts identified
  • 61% of these fake accounts are less than 3 months old (since April
    16th, 2012)
  • Average age of these fake accounts is 19 weeks or about 5 months
  • 55% of fake accounts have ~2000 followings
  • The average number of following for a fake account is 1,799
  • The oldest fake account @krails is
    created on Jan 15th, 2007





 twitter-dist-creation-dates-for-fakers-1-1024x381
Figure 3: The distribution of creation time for
all fake Twitter accounts
Considering there were more than 11,000 Abusers identified from only 3
purchases we made, we are amazed by the size of market for selling and buying
Twitter followers.

Several quick conclusions about these statistics:

  • Dealers are controlling the following speed and total following number of
    these fake accounts to avoid being suspended by Twitter. Dealers built various
    business services from the controlled accounts, as every cent is still money,
    e.g., selling 2000 re-tweets for $5 at here.
  • Half of the abusers have 4,000-26,000 followers, which makes them the most
    likely to be “cheating” group; and 3/4 of Abusers have set a URL in their
    profiles, meaning they might buy followers for website promotional purposes.
  • Fake accounts normally follow a lot of people, but normally no bigger than
    2001 followings, indicating Twitter may internally uses this number as a cutoff
    for abused account detection.
  • Still, these statistics of fake followers can be easily used for detection
    purposes. However, Dealers can apply obscure techniques to make them hard to
    detect, e.g., randomly following some famous and some average people, or posting
    tweets grabbed from the Twitter stream, etc. This is one reason that the prices
    of followers vary dramatically on eBay and other online websites, ranging from
    $2 to $55 per 1,000 followers. The higher the price is, the more real these
    followers look.
  • On the other side, Abusers can try to avoid being caught as well, by buying
    followers multiple times from different services. For example, since March
    2nd 2012, the world’s “Top One” security expert Gregory D. Evans (@GregoryDEvans) seemed to be
    purchasing 4 times to gain at least 50,000 new
    followers     from several resources, which we do not know.  But, by running an
    overlapping check between his followers and our purchased followers, we found
    470 fake accounts shown in both list. Bingo! That is also the
    **magic** number used in our study to detect all other Abusers.










Figure 4 & 5: left) One partial of 470  accounts followed both @GregoryDEvans and us; right) The
following trending stats of GregoryDEvans
from twittercounter.com



Most interestingly, during our investigation, Republican nominee for US
President Mitt Romney has been scrutinized recently for his abnormal increase in
new followers (@mittromney),
indicating that these followers had been purchased in the same way as the
Dealers/Abuser scenario from our study. We do note that these followers could
have been purchased by either himself, his associates or by his opponents.
Particularly, on July 21st, 2012, his follower number went from
673,002 to 789,924, representing a gain of 116,922 or 17%.  As this story picked
up momentum, we quickly pulled his newest followers since the big breakout,
(resulting in 152,966 new Twitter accounts), and can disclose several
interesting statistics of these followers.

Statistics of Romney’s newest 152,966 Twitter followers(between Jul
21st and Jul 26th 2012):

  • The number of Romney’s followers increased 17% (or 116,922) on a single day
    Jul 21, 2012, going from 673,002 to 789,924
  • 25% of these followers are less than 3 weeks old (created after July
    17th 2012), 80% of them are less than 3 months old
  • 23% or about 1/4 of these followers have no tweet
  • 10% of these account has already been suspended by Twitter







Figure 6 & 7: left) The distribution of creation time of Romney’s
recently followers; right) The following trending stats of MittRomney
from twittercounter.com



Based on the above distinguishable features, we believe most of these recent
followers of Romney are not from a general Twitter population but most likely
from a paid Twitter follower service. Also notice that Romney’s newest followers
did have few different statistical features than our purchased followers (e.g.
much newer than ours), indicating his followers were purchased from a different
data resource than ours.

It is important to note that authentication is not required when buying
Twitter followers from eBay or other websites. It is possible for anyone to buy
followers for other Twitter users. That being said, Romney’s newest followers
could have been paid for by himself, his associates or by his opponents. So far,
there is not a feasible way to confirm who is responsible.

Finally, creating fake Twitter accounts and buying/selling followers is
against Twitter’s ToS, and gradually erodes the overall value of the social
network. Twitter keeps on detecting fake accounts and followings, and suspending
them in last few years. However, if they do not move faster and smarter, these
fake accounts will continue to be created, blended into the massive Twitter
population, bringing bigger and bigger impact.

This underground Twitter business is just blooming.
























































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