Facebook Sues China-Based Companies For Selling Fake Accounts

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Facebook and its Instagram unit sued four companies and three people based in China for promoting the sale of fake accounts, likes and followers that the social network giant says can be used for nefarious purposes. The Chinese companies advertised and created the fake accounts over the last two years and marketed them for sale on six websites, selling them in bulk quantities, according to a complaint filed Friday in San Francisco federal court. "Fake and inauthentic accounts can be used for spam and phishing campaigns, misinformation campaigns, marketing scams, advertising fraud, and other fraud schemes which are profitable at scale," Facebook and Instagram alleged. They said fake accounts were also created on Amazon, Apple, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter. The companies named as defendants -- 9 Xiu Shenzhen, 9 Xiu Feishu, 9 Xiufei and Home Network -- are based in Longyan and Shenzhen. They are affiliated manufacturers of electronics and hardware, as well as providers of software and online advertising services, according to the complaint.

Re:They make it so easy

[dnaumov]

What can the US judicial system do? Seize the US assets of the chinese company and it's management as well as petition for various trade embargoes.

Full of noise and fury, signifying nothing

[mrbester]

Who cares? The companies and individuals in China don't care because US law doesn't apply there. Rest of world doesn't care because federal court also doesn't mean anything outside US.

Why even bother filing suit? All it does is provide more proof that Facebook is a steaming pile of dingos kidneys that scams can be set up so readily.

Re:

[Merlin Aldous]

Exactly. Just leaving this here: https://coincircle.com/l/fLS02... [coincircle.com]

Re:

[rtb61]

Facebook cares because they are stealing Facebook's business model, they are just being bitchy because they can not patent the business model of creating fake accounts, likes and followers and own the planet.

block vpn source?

[HongoBelando]

Since fbis blocked and can be accessed only via vpn (or maybe via somes rules in chinese fw) why doesnt fb just use their "AI" to correlate ipsrc, x-referrer, languge setting etc. fb collects so much data it seems difficult that this is not in their reach

We need a ...

[CaptainDork]

... Great Firewall of China and get China to pay for it.

I have to think of everything.

Just buy all the fake accounts.

[wolfheart111]

problem solved :)

Re:

[ezdiy]

You laugh, but this is how adults (read: game companies) deal with chinese (and brazilian, and russian and romanian...) account sweatshops. Buy many sample quantities from a wow gold vendor, link it back to the bot which farmed it - in case of social spam - date of registration, ip netblocks & phone numbers. This is ridiculously cheap to do. In case of wow, it can be on the order of $1 sample vs $100k banned.

TFA is either zuckerberg admitting he's failing antispam 101, or some sort of lame choir maki