Post by lizaseo11 on Nov 8, 2024 21:47:26 GMT -6
Viral posts on VKontakte, Instagram (owned by Meta, an organization banned in the Russian Federation) or Facebook (owned by Meta, an organization banned in the Russian Federation) with thousands of likes are a common thing that we see every day. And, it would seem, what does a farm and ordinary clicks have to do with it? Given that they are not always put up by interested people who really liked the post, photo or video. And not even always by people.
In recent years, the demand for buying likes, driving subscribers to communities and personal pages has increased significantly. And in order to make your content or personal page popular, when the public is not interested in them, you have to buy clicks. And where there is demand, there is supply. And in this case, the technology of entire farms is used. This is a serious underground business in which huge amounts of money are circulating.
The price of happiness: one dollar per thousand likes or followers on Twitter. $200 million a year - earnings from the activity of fake users on Facebook ( source ).
But not everything is so rosy. Large market players and government agencies have decided to declare war on those who destroy the priorities and principles of honest digital cooperation. They identify unscrupulous "businessmen" and organize raids to eliminate such farms around the world. Thanks to which we can now get to know better what it is and how it all works.
Contents hide
1. What is a click farm?
2. Why and who uses a click farm
3. Where are they used?
3.1. Click farms and popularity manipulation in SMM
3.2. Click fraud farms and advertising
3.3. Click farm and botnets
4. Examples of click farms and how to combat them
5. Click farms are a business. Is it legal?
6. How to avoid becoming a victim and protect your budget
What is a click farm
Click farms are a type of digital fraud that uses multiple smartphones (usually outdated models) and low-paid labor of real (and not only) users. The farmer (master) gives the farm operator tasks: click on advertisements, like, subscribe, watch videos, that is, interact with a web resource or content block for a relatively small fee.
Farms create pseudo-conversion . For example, advertisers lose money on ads without getting real customers. Or for a relatively small reward, someone fraudulently promotes their Instagram account without any guarantees of natural popularity growth.
What devices are used. Click shopify website design farms mainly use smartphones and counterfeit SIM cards, since social networks require registration by number. Monitors and other auxiliary devices are also used.
Why and who uses click farm
Farm "workers" are happy to perform tasks in three cases:
Some people use clicks for commercial purposes. For example, a new product is released, but how can you draw attention to it without investing significant budget and time into natural promotion? It is enough to get subscribers, put a lot of likes, so that the product or service acquires pseudo-popularity and citation.
Small budget for promotion. Another reason why click farms are used. After all, in today's reality, promoting your own business is impossible without SMM (Social Media Marketing). And when most of the budget goes to advertising the product, optimization, press, etc., then only a small part of this budget may be left for promoting the product on social networks. And pseudo-likes and pseudo-subscribers, which can help to promote, will cost no more than a dollar per hundred.
Need a quick increase in popularity. Indeed, why wait weeks for the result of high-quality and professional work of a marketer, when you can now and immediately get thousands of "likes" for a reasonable fee.
Where are they used?
Click farms are becoming more and more common every day. They are ready to click, watch, subscribe to anyone who pays for it. If a business owner or user wants a post on a social network to become popular as soon as possible, they turn to this service.
Click farms and manipulation of popularity in SMM
Life in the modern digital world is millions and millions of clicks, comments, subscriptions every day. And it is also an addiction. The owners of the click farm play on this very manifestation of feelings - on the psychology of the user's dependence on social networks and activity within this conglomerate. On his desire to promote his account, show his content to a larger audience of users, get his "high" from the flow of likes.
In the case of business, as we indicated above, this is a quick and artificial promotion of a new product.
On the bad side. When buying clicks or impressions, the content is shown mainly to bots or pseudo-subscribers. They also give likes. It turns out that the user wastes money just to feel important or wastes the advertising budget on non-converting bots instead of investing in the services of a good marketer.
Click fraud farms and advertising
Clicks are not only needed to put a “thumbs up”. Advertisers who place their ads on social networks, search engines or partner sites suffer no less from such fraudulent schemes.
In the early 2010s, PPC advertising accounted for 40 to 80% of all Facebook advertising. Advertisers who used this ad placement model claimed that 20% of their budget was spent on invalid clicks. So they teamed up and tried to recover this damage from the social network in court. Facebook representatives were able to justify themselves, and the court dismissed the claim. If the court had satisfied the claim of the affected advertisers, the social network would have had to compensate for damages in the amount of 2.5 billion dollars.
Click farm and botnets
It is bots and botnets that are used in 2021 to automate this entire process. We have previously written about botnets, what they are and why they are dangerous . For experienced "farmers", such a tool is one of the options for automating illegal earnings. A hacker can remotely perform any actions on the network on behalf of a phone infected with malware: visit websites, wind up likes, click on ads, watch videos.
You can “catch” a botnet virus by downloading unverified third-party applications.
Examples of click farms and how to combat them
Example 1. In 2017, a criminal click fraud farm was discovered during a raid by Thai police. In a house located near the border of Thailand and Cambodia, stands with five hundred smartphones connected to monitors were found. The police also found almost 350,000 SIM cards and several dozen additional devices in the house. As it turned out later, three Chinese citizens who were engaged in click fraud in Thailand managed a network of fictitious accounts in the WeChat messenger.
Example 2. In 2014, Instagram conducted its “raid” on fake users and deleted millions of accounts that were allegedly suspected of spam. And then two more problems were added to one: the aim was lost, and the accounts of real users were deleted; some stars lost half of their subscribers into oblivion - the biggest loss was that of the famous singer Justin Bieber - minus 3.5 million subscribers.
Example 3. Particularly experienced and cunning farmers do this. They connect fifty phones, on which they register different accounts in Google. They download conditionally free applications from Google Play and click on ads. The main thing that such a businessman needs to do is alternate accounts.
Example 4. India: Click farm in Delhi (2017). Journalists from the French international TV channel France24 conducted their own investigation, during which they found fraudsters from Delhi.
The report includes an interview with a person who used the services of such a click farm. In it, he talks about how he managed to boost the ratings of his company's own Facebook account.
This is just a fraction of what the farms are capable of, which earn their owners around $152 billion a year from fake reviews. The report also shows photos of the farms in action and how easy it is for them to create fake profiles posing as real users.
Example 5. China: A team of clickers in a small office (2017). One of the most infamous videos demonstrating the work of a click farm was filmed by a Russian tourist. He visited a farm in one of the Chinese cities.
The video shows a tiny office with several stands containing mobile phones connected to each other to synchronize actions. The farm specialized in generating custom reviews and simulating pseudo-activity on social networks.
Example 6. China: Blatant Click Farm Advertisements on YouTube and FB (2020). One of the cybersecurity experts, while studying the farm phenomenon, came across their blatant advertisements on YouTube. The advertisement was called “Click Fraud Services on Facebook, Bing and Google Ads”.
He found a scammers' account on FB with a photo of a bunch of phones connected to one computer. The expert decided to check and contact the owners of this business. He wrote that he has a website where he wants to increase views and clicks on the ads he places there. To which the polite consultant girl during the conversation said that they provide such a service and even gave guarantees that Google will not ban his site or block it for click fraud. And all this for some 100 dollars.
Case 7. Central Asia: Instagram Clicks (2020). In September 2020, an operation against cyber fraud uncovered a farm for creating fake Instagram accounts. It was located somewhere in Central Asia, presumably in Kazakhstan or Armenia.
The scammers used a complex system of proxy servers, IP address changes and VPN services to hide their activities. The click farm was designed to manage tens of thousands of fake accounts.
The scammers' activities were reported to Facebook, which owns Instagram, with the aim of blocking the fake accounts.
Example 8. China: The Largest Click Farm and Uniformed Workers (2018). The examples before this were just the tip of the iceberg. This farm is truly mind-boggling in its scale. The video of the largest farm originally appeared on TikTok , showing an open office, most likely somewhere in China, with thousands of phones and computers with emulators connected to them.
The video shows that the workers of this farm are even dressed in the same uniform, which indicates a high level of organization of the entire process. Each worker, in addition to phones and computers, also has tablets, apparently in order to multiply the efficiency of generating fakes.
Example 9. China: The Viral “Click Farm Lady” (2015) Every industry has its own icon. One of these in this industry is a photo of an Asian female click farm operator sitting in front of a counter with a bunch of phones. The photo dates back to 2015, when it was first posted on a post on Chinese social media platform Weibo, and subsequently went viral.
What's happening in the photo: a young girl is a click farm operator, she downloads various applications from the Chinese App Store onto these phones. Reportedly, it is enough to install ten top applications on all these phones, and you can earn about 11 thousand dollars.
Example 10. Home farms (2020). One of the features of this type of fraud is that it is not difficult to create such a farm yourself. All you need is to dial a bunch of phones (usually old versions with outdated operating systems), connect to a computer and use for your criminal purposes. In fact, there are many such farms, their activities extend from Kenya and Bangladesh to the United States.
Click farms are a business. Is it legal?
Doesn't it seem to you that all this smells of something not quite legal (especially after using the term "fraudulent")? Generally speaking, to some extent it is. Click farms are a dubious business model, the implementation of which violates both the ethical framework and the terms of the user agreement of most platforms. There is a benefit, but what is the path to it?
The farm employs people from developing countries. They work for pennies and without any adequate working conditions. This can be compared to clothing factories, where cheap child labor is used. Only here, instead of sewing machines and clothes, there are smartphones and likes. Regionally, this is Indonesia, China, the Philippines, Thailand.
And if we consider click farms from the point of view of compliance with labor laws, then they are violated mercilessly. Which already indicates that this is a semi-legal and fraudulent business. And considering that with the help of pseudo-clicks the budget of advertising campaigns can be drained, then even more so.
There are no laws that would prohibit the operation of farms. Only China has a law on unfair competition. But even there there is no such concept that would correspond to this activity.
How to avoid becoming a victim and protect your budget
As we wrote above, despite the fact that we are talking primarily about pseudo-clicks on Facebook and other social networks, click farms also operate in relation to PPC advertisements. Unscrupulous competitors, cunning partners and simply scammers pay money for clicking advertisements, which leads to a decrease in KPI and significant expenses.
The best way to protect your advertising budget is to install professional protection against click fraud, bots and spam Botfaqtor . The algorithm uses hundreds of metrics to calculate whether the user who clicked on the ad is real. Bots are blocked, the money remains safe and sound.
Submit a request for a free product test. Compare the results and make sure that your budget is best spent on potential buyers, not bots.
In recent years, the demand for buying likes, driving subscribers to communities and personal pages has increased significantly. And in order to make your content or personal page popular, when the public is not interested in them, you have to buy clicks. And where there is demand, there is supply. And in this case, the technology of entire farms is used. This is a serious underground business in which huge amounts of money are circulating.
The price of happiness: one dollar per thousand likes or followers on Twitter. $200 million a year - earnings from the activity of fake users on Facebook ( source ).
But not everything is so rosy. Large market players and government agencies have decided to declare war on those who destroy the priorities and principles of honest digital cooperation. They identify unscrupulous "businessmen" and organize raids to eliminate such farms around the world. Thanks to which we can now get to know better what it is and how it all works.
Contents hide
1. What is a click farm?
2. Why and who uses a click farm
3. Where are they used?
3.1. Click farms and popularity manipulation in SMM
3.2. Click fraud farms and advertising
3.3. Click farm and botnets
4. Examples of click farms and how to combat them
5. Click farms are a business. Is it legal?
6. How to avoid becoming a victim and protect your budget
What is a click farm
Click farms are a type of digital fraud that uses multiple smartphones (usually outdated models) and low-paid labor of real (and not only) users. The farmer (master) gives the farm operator tasks: click on advertisements, like, subscribe, watch videos, that is, interact with a web resource or content block for a relatively small fee.
Farms create pseudo-conversion . For example, advertisers lose money on ads without getting real customers. Or for a relatively small reward, someone fraudulently promotes their Instagram account without any guarantees of natural popularity growth.
What devices are used. Click shopify website design farms mainly use smartphones and counterfeit SIM cards, since social networks require registration by number. Monitors and other auxiliary devices are also used.
Why and who uses click farm
Farm "workers" are happy to perform tasks in three cases:
Some people use clicks for commercial purposes. For example, a new product is released, but how can you draw attention to it without investing significant budget and time into natural promotion? It is enough to get subscribers, put a lot of likes, so that the product or service acquires pseudo-popularity and citation.
Small budget for promotion. Another reason why click farms are used. After all, in today's reality, promoting your own business is impossible without SMM (Social Media Marketing). And when most of the budget goes to advertising the product, optimization, press, etc., then only a small part of this budget may be left for promoting the product on social networks. And pseudo-likes and pseudo-subscribers, which can help to promote, will cost no more than a dollar per hundred.
Need a quick increase in popularity. Indeed, why wait weeks for the result of high-quality and professional work of a marketer, when you can now and immediately get thousands of "likes" for a reasonable fee.
Where are they used?
Click farms are becoming more and more common every day. They are ready to click, watch, subscribe to anyone who pays for it. If a business owner or user wants a post on a social network to become popular as soon as possible, they turn to this service.
Click farms and manipulation of popularity in SMM
Life in the modern digital world is millions and millions of clicks, comments, subscriptions every day. And it is also an addiction. The owners of the click farm play on this very manifestation of feelings - on the psychology of the user's dependence on social networks and activity within this conglomerate. On his desire to promote his account, show his content to a larger audience of users, get his "high" from the flow of likes.
In the case of business, as we indicated above, this is a quick and artificial promotion of a new product.
On the bad side. When buying clicks or impressions, the content is shown mainly to bots or pseudo-subscribers. They also give likes. It turns out that the user wastes money just to feel important or wastes the advertising budget on non-converting bots instead of investing in the services of a good marketer.
Click fraud farms and advertising
Clicks are not only needed to put a “thumbs up”. Advertisers who place their ads on social networks, search engines or partner sites suffer no less from such fraudulent schemes.
In the early 2010s, PPC advertising accounted for 40 to 80% of all Facebook advertising. Advertisers who used this ad placement model claimed that 20% of their budget was spent on invalid clicks. So they teamed up and tried to recover this damage from the social network in court. Facebook representatives were able to justify themselves, and the court dismissed the claim. If the court had satisfied the claim of the affected advertisers, the social network would have had to compensate for damages in the amount of 2.5 billion dollars.
Click farm and botnets
It is bots and botnets that are used in 2021 to automate this entire process. We have previously written about botnets, what they are and why they are dangerous . For experienced "farmers", such a tool is one of the options for automating illegal earnings. A hacker can remotely perform any actions on the network on behalf of a phone infected with malware: visit websites, wind up likes, click on ads, watch videos.
You can “catch” a botnet virus by downloading unverified third-party applications.
Examples of click farms and how to combat them
Example 1. In 2017, a criminal click fraud farm was discovered during a raid by Thai police. In a house located near the border of Thailand and Cambodia, stands with five hundred smartphones connected to monitors were found. The police also found almost 350,000 SIM cards and several dozen additional devices in the house. As it turned out later, three Chinese citizens who were engaged in click fraud in Thailand managed a network of fictitious accounts in the WeChat messenger.
Example 2. In 2014, Instagram conducted its “raid” on fake users and deleted millions of accounts that were allegedly suspected of spam. And then two more problems were added to one: the aim was lost, and the accounts of real users were deleted; some stars lost half of their subscribers into oblivion - the biggest loss was that of the famous singer Justin Bieber - minus 3.5 million subscribers.
Example 3. Particularly experienced and cunning farmers do this. They connect fifty phones, on which they register different accounts in Google. They download conditionally free applications from Google Play and click on ads. The main thing that such a businessman needs to do is alternate accounts.
Example 4. India: Click farm in Delhi (2017). Journalists from the French international TV channel France24 conducted their own investigation, during which they found fraudsters from Delhi.
The report includes an interview with a person who used the services of such a click farm. In it, he talks about how he managed to boost the ratings of his company's own Facebook account.
This is just a fraction of what the farms are capable of, which earn their owners around $152 billion a year from fake reviews. The report also shows photos of the farms in action and how easy it is for them to create fake profiles posing as real users.
Example 5. China: A team of clickers in a small office (2017). One of the most infamous videos demonstrating the work of a click farm was filmed by a Russian tourist. He visited a farm in one of the Chinese cities.
The video shows a tiny office with several stands containing mobile phones connected to each other to synchronize actions. The farm specialized in generating custom reviews and simulating pseudo-activity on social networks.
Example 6. China: Blatant Click Farm Advertisements on YouTube and FB (2020). One of the cybersecurity experts, while studying the farm phenomenon, came across their blatant advertisements on YouTube. The advertisement was called “Click Fraud Services on Facebook, Bing and Google Ads”.
He found a scammers' account on FB with a photo of a bunch of phones connected to one computer. The expert decided to check and contact the owners of this business. He wrote that he has a website where he wants to increase views and clicks on the ads he places there. To which the polite consultant girl during the conversation said that they provide such a service and even gave guarantees that Google will not ban his site or block it for click fraud. And all this for some 100 dollars.
Case 7. Central Asia: Instagram Clicks (2020). In September 2020, an operation against cyber fraud uncovered a farm for creating fake Instagram accounts. It was located somewhere in Central Asia, presumably in Kazakhstan or Armenia.
The scammers used a complex system of proxy servers, IP address changes and VPN services to hide their activities. The click farm was designed to manage tens of thousands of fake accounts.
The scammers' activities were reported to Facebook, which owns Instagram, with the aim of blocking the fake accounts.
Example 8. China: The Largest Click Farm and Uniformed Workers (2018). The examples before this were just the tip of the iceberg. This farm is truly mind-boggling in its scale. The video of the largest farm originally appeared on TikTok , showing an open office, most likely somewhere in China, with thousands of phones and computers with emulators connected to them.
The video shows that the workers of this farm are even dressed in the same uniform, which indicates a high level of organization of the entire process. Each worker, in addition to phones and computers, also has tablets, apparently in order to multiply the efficiency of generating fakes.
Example 9. China: The Viral “Click Farm Lady” (2015) Every industry has its own icon. One of these in this industry is a photo of an Asian female click farm operator sitting in front of a counter with a bunch of phones. The photo dates back to 2015, when it was first posted on a post on Chinese social media platform Weibo, and subsequently went viral.
What's happening in the photo: a young girl is a click farm operator, she downloads various applications from the Chinese App Store onto these phones. Reportedly, it is enough to install ten top applications on all these phones, and you can earn about 11 thousand dollars.
Example 10. Home farms (2020). One of the features of this type of fraud is that it is not difficult to create such a farm yourself. All you need is to dial a bunch of phones (usually old versions with outdated operating systems), connect to a computer and use for your criminal purposes. In fact, there are many such farms, their activities extend from Kenya and Bangladesh to the United States.
Click farms are a business. Is it legal?
Doesn't it seem to you that all this smells of something not quite legal (especially after using the term "fraudulent")? Generally speaking, to some extent it is. Click farms are a dubious business model, the implementation of which violates both the ethical framework and the terms of the user agreement of most platforms. There is a benefit, but what is the path to it?
The farm employs people from developing countries. They work for pennies and without any adequate working conditions. This can be compared to clothing factories, where cheap child labor is used. Only here, instead of sewing machines and clothes, there are smartphones and likes. Regionally, this is Indonesia, China, the Philippines, Thailand.
And if we consider click farms from the point of view of compliance with labor laws, then they are violated mercilessly. Which already indicates that this is a semi-legal and fraudulent business. And considering that with the help of pseudo-clicks the budget of advertising campaigns can be drained, then even more so.
There are no laws that would prohibit the operation of farms. Only China has a law on unfair competition. But even there there is no such concept that would correspond to this activity.
How to avoid becoming a victim and protect your budget
As we wrote above, despite the fact that we are talking primarily about pseudo-clicks on Facebook and other social networks, click farms also operate in relation to PPC advertisements. Unscrupulous competitors, cunning partners and simply scammers pay money for clicking advertisements, which leads to a decrease in KPI and significant expenses.
The best way to protect your advertising budget is to install professional protection against click fraud, bots and spam Botfaqtor . The algorithm uses hundreds of metrics to calculate whether the user who clicked on the ad is real. Bots are blocked, the money remains safe and sound.
Submit a request for a free product test. Compare the results and make sure that your budget is best spent on potential buyers, not bots.