5 min
The social media has a huge influence in the world today. Information and communication technology has changed very rapidly in the recent past and social media is the key and inescapable emergence.
With the growing influence of social media and technology, it has become an easy platform for internet scammers’ to target the public and involve them in click-farms. The ad page on social media is taken a disadvantage of and we see these click farms regularly.
Here are the top 5 notorious click-farms in south Asia.
1.Fake SIM cards using WeChat:
Police in Thailand found three Chinese individuals running an extensive fake click enterprise. They were involved in smuggling fake SIM cards into the country. The trio explained that they were actually operating a network of so-called sock puppet accounts on China’s social network of WeChat. In total, Thai police reportedly seized almost 350,00 SIM cards, 21 SIM card readers, and nine computers. The offenders had a makeshift metal rig fitted with 500 smartphones in their house.
A company in China reportedly supplied the phones and paid them 150,000 baht ($4403) a month for the operation.
2.Fake video sites:
Up to 90 percent of the views of some of China’s most popular video sites are fake, according to state media reports. There was footage of a Russian media outlet visiting a click farm in China with hundreds of phones plugged in, being surfaced. All of these phones performed various kinds of tasks, from streaming music to rating mobile apps to inflating Youtube views.
3.Political parties:
Click farming is very popular among political parties. A national party had deployed 200 people, who are paid about ₹8,000 a month to click and share positive posts and images about the party. One Indonesian click farmer had said that he had funnelled two million Facebook likes to a candidate in his nation’s contested July 2014 presidential election. During the 2012 US Presidential campaign, Mitt Romney gained more than 100,000 Twitter followers in a single weekend, despite averaging only 4,000 new followers a day previously. One Indonesian click farmer told me that he had funnelled 2 million Facebook likes to a candidate in his nation's hotly contested July 2014 presidential election.
Trump had 1.7 million followers on Facebook during the 2016 election, but only 42 percent of the likes were from the US. Most of them came from developing nations.
"This is our distributed model of click farms, where foot soldiers of the party generate massive shares which help in spreading the ideology of the party leaders," said Rajiv, who did not want to be identified. "It’s a part-time job for these guys. The list includes college students, shop owners and even regular 9 to 5 officer goers.
4.Businesses:
Cebu city of Philippines is very famous for click farming. It has plenty of click farms used for outsourcing and industrial businesses. There are infrastructures that can carry the call centre and technical support data to Cebu City from around the globe to run fake profiles. Cheap, local resources can be used to benefit and grow popularity.
5.Social media pages:
Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, is an international hub for click farms. A check on Facebook showed Dhaka was the most popular city for many, including Leo Messi, who has 51 million likes; Facebook's own security page with has 7.7 million likes and Google's Facebook page, which has 15.2 million likes. In 2013, the State Department, which has more than 400,000 likes and was recently most popular in Cairo. In one case, its fan tally rose from about 10,000 to more than 2.5 million.
The CEO of a Dhaka-based social media promotion firm Unique IT World, Shaiful Islam, said he has paid workers to manually click on clients' social media pages, making it harder for Facebook, Google and others to catch them. "Those accounts are not fake, they were genuine," he said.
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