I recently heard that some 80 million Facebook accounts are actually fake users:
Facebook: 8.7 percent are fake users
Recently, Barracuda Labs released a study on Dealers and Abusers of fake Twitter accounts:
The Twitter Underground Economy: A Blooming Business
My first thoughts: how sad is it for someone to actually buy followers? Reminds me of a kid in grade school I once knew who came to school with a huge lunch bag. He’d give candy and snacks to the popular kids in hopes of becoming friends with the cool crowd. Where this becomes sinister is when someone makes themselves look like an expert on a particular topic because they proclaim to have thousands of Twitter followers. Abusers may even be able to get advertisers to pay for tweets about a related product or service.
A quick search on ebay shows several Dealers of fake Twitter followers…
Amazing…
