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Facebook Spammers Make $20M, Get $100K Fine
jfruh writes "Adscend Media, which has been making up to $20M a year from so-called 'likejacking' spam on Facebook, has reached an agreement with the Attorney General of Washington to stop those activities and pay $100,000 in court costs. Among other nefarious techniques, Adscend would overlay Facebook 'like' buttons with provocative photos to spread links to ads from which Adscend would earn referral fees. Adscend also settled out of court with Facebook for an undisclosed amount."
Banks crash the world economy selling junk loans, get 400 billion.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I like my 'lock them in their headquarters and set in on fire' plan better.
I don't understand, how provocative can you be with those tiny "Like" buttons? Maybe enough space to show 1/5th of a nipple? Perhaps they just color it with a skin tone to give people the impression they're looking at a naked button.
They didn't "make" 20 million. They collected 13 million in 2011, minus operating and labor costs, and earned about 2 million overall. So they were hit with a 5% fine.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Definitive proof that it is better to ask forgiveness than ask permission.
It seems like you're wrong. You and at least 3 people with mod points did not RTFA
In January, McKennaâ(TM)s office and Facebook sued Jeremy Bash and Fehzan Ali, the owners of Adscend Media LLC for initiating posts to Facebook pages that appeared to offer visitors an opportunity to view scandalous or provocative content. However, before being able to view the content, a series of required steps lured Facebook users into eventually visiting commercial websites. Other tactics included âoelikejacking,â in which Facebook users were tricked into clicking the âoelikeâ button, inadvertently spreading the sales pitches to friends.
Adscend, hired to promote products, in turn does business with âoeaffiliatesâ who create attention-getting marketing messages. Too often, according to the Attorney Generalâ(TM)s Office, those messages amounted to social media spam. Todayâ(TM)s settlement enjoins Adscend and its affiliates from initiating messages that contain misleading or false headers or those that hide the true identity of the sender
Ascend was spamming and getting paid by affiliates to spam on their behalf.
I really only have six words for Washington AG: Admission of Liability & Disgorgment of Profits
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
crime pays... like that's not a known fact by now.
Only in america.
Ascend was spamming and getting paid by affiliates to spam on their behalf.
This shows you don't know how online advertising works. Why would affiliates pay Adscend? This is not how it works. Advertisers pay Adscend and in turn Adscend pays affiliates to promote those advertisers, usually for commissions. They act as kind of broker.
The news piece you pasted clearly says this too, especially the part about Adscend doing business with advertisers and then in turn affiliates.
Knowing the field (but not participating on the dark sides of it), there are many products and ways that are meant to hide the activity from these advertising companies. They exist because the affiliates will get (rightly) banned and no money paid when they are found out of doing shit like this.
There's a whole industry out there spamming "social". At the top are the advertisers who want results and don't ask too many questions. Below them are the SEO firms, advertising things like "Guaranteed first page listings or your money back". Below them are the businesses that sell "bulk Likes", "+1"s, and fake reviews.
But that's not the bottom of the swamp. The people generating fake social rankings need services to help them. So there are outfits which sell fake Google, Facebook, and Yelp accounts in bulk. Software companies which sell tools for creating fake accounts in bulk. ("250,000 +1 votes per day on a fast connection" ) Outsourcing firms which create fake accounts. These operations tend not to advertise openly, but can be found on "black hat" SEO forums.
They, in turn, need support services. They need fake IP addresses and fake phone numbers for verification calls. There are services to provide those. You can rent phone numbers in bulk for 20 minutes. Bulk IP addresses, needed for bulk fake account creation, come from proxies, many of which come from malware on compromised machines. This is down at the organized crime level.
See our paper "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" for the gory details.
This all started in late 2010, when Google started feeding "local" social data into web search results. There had been social spamming before that, but it was a minor business. Once Google went "social", social spamming took off. Now, social spamming is mainstream SEO. It's cheaper than running a link farm. It's also safer. There's seldom any retaliation from the search engines for social spamming. Even if they detect a fake social account, they can't tie it back to the source. With link farms, the whole farm can be banned, which can shut down a SEO firm.
Yet it is not a problem for Google, because it violates the AdSense program policies, which are strictly enforced. This is an area where Adscend failed.
Adscend is hired as the advertising company, and their "affiliates" are basically subcontractors. How this would have actually played out in court is unknown. It would depend on the contractual agreements made between the "affiliates" and Adscend, particularly an indemnity clause, as well as Adscend's knowledge of the "likejacking", policies against it or other illegal advertising means, and enforcement of such policies.
Adscend, hired to promote products, in turn does business with "affiliates" who create attention-getting marketing messages.
Adscend was spamming and getting paid by affiliates to spam on their behalf.
Sorry, this is not how it works with Adscend. You need to dig a little deeper than the paragraphs you quoted, since you misinterpreted them.
Adscend was not getting paid by affiliates. Adscend was getting paid by the companies that hired Adscend to do the advertising. In turn, Adscend employed the use of affiliates (subcontractors) to create advertisements and distribute links.
The "affiliates" posted the spam, which linked to their own affiliate web sites either running on the Adscend "content locking" web platform or using the Adscend APIs. The only way the visitor can unlock the content is by performing a predefined task, such as clicking a facebook "like" or providing personal information. The affiliates would create the likejacking buttons.
The money trail:
1) Visitors "like" a company's facebook page.
2) Said company pays Adscend for each "like" generated, as per their advertising agreement.
3) Adscend pays it's affiliate a fixed amount for each "like" generated, as per the affiliate agreement.
It seems like you're wrong. You and at least 3 people with mod points did not RTFA
Well, hopefully it was the "Admission of Liability & Disgorgment[sic] of Profits" statement that earned your +5 Informative.
...that Facebook is already past its prime? I'm getting a serious AOL flashback every time I read something like this, that it's teenyboppers and grandmas who are affected, most other demographics have already moved on to Google+ and the like.
Admission of Liability & Disgorgment of Profits
It boils down to the simplest understanding of capitalism - if it's profitable, they'll do it.
A $100,000 fine on a $20,000,000 income is viewed as an expense more than anything else.
A $20,100,000 fine would stop this stuff dead cold.
Fines should seize any and all profits made while violating the law and add an additional penalty.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
The self-appointed experts who got on national TV news programs or in other ways to advise the public at-large that they will not have enough money to retire unless they invest in the stock market should have to answer for their false claims. Even Bob Dole got on the radio with a public service announcement to say that "markets rebound, they always do". Most of his retired audience at the time have now died broke and penniless. Ed McMahon is a sad example. When I first had a salary and money to invest the "irrefutable" advice of the time was to buy-and-hold. Those who regularly dropped bad stocks for better stocks were the butt of jokes because grandma just bought ten companies, held them for 30 years, and retired better than all those stock traders. Now look and see who's pimping the buy-and-hold theory these days. Nobody. But Dave Ramsey says that any half-wit investor can average out a 12% return over the course of five years or so. And don't get me started on Cramer, Orman, Trump, or Kiyosaki. Though I would give Kiyosaki credit for warning that a home is not an asset years before so many people overspent on their homes with the speculative presumption that their salaries would increase as well as their house values. So many of the people at the peak were panic buyers, convinced that in just a few more years house prices would be so great that they would not have a chance in the future to even buy their own homes. Where were the experts then to calm them down? They were silent, or at least there wasn't enough airtime to squeeze them in between the best-selling authors.
The greatest trick of all time was taking away the pensions of the working class and telling them they had to invest in a 401k for retirement. Most of these 401k plans still lack essential investment options, like a gold or precious metals fund, or a commodities fund, or even an affordable cash fund. In most cases a money market account in a 401k is going to lose value over time due to the high maintenance costs compared to the low returns. By having no choice but to pick between 6 to 10 fund options, most working Americans were stuck holding the bag of confusing and sub-prime investments and most still don't even know it. If that's not bad enough, when was the last time you voted as a stockholder for the stocks that were held in your 401k? It's like handing your money to a complete stranger and then saying, "no we don't need a contract. Spend it however you like. I just assume it will come back with a return." The inmates were running the asylum and we gave them the keys!
So, working Americans were duped into believing they could compete in the stock market even though they were limited to one trade per month when the day-traders were taking advantage of price fluctuations that lasted for less than one second. Most Americans had no way to understand the investments on the same level as their Goldman Sachs counterparts. Even when a few 401k investors were willing to educate themselves they were limited to macro-scale investments, such as index funds or managed growth funds, for which the economic fundamentals cannot be as easily explored as owning an equally diversified portfolio of ten individual stocks. But America's employed workforce will continue to follow the delusion that they are "investors" until forty years from now they do the math and find out they would have been better off owning hard assets like the house they live in with enough land to grow their own food supply and sufficient guns and ammo to defend it. Or they could have pooled their savings with their peers to lobby Congress like their corporate overlords did to pass things like caps on malpractice suits, bankruptcy "reform", and mandatory health coverage without a public option or the teeth to make insurers actually pay for medically necessary care.
They won't, because metamoderation doesn't work like that any more.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".