Facebook Spammers Make $20M, Get $100K Fine 74
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."
Re:Adscend Media wasn't spamming (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:Adscend Media wasn't spamming (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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 p
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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.
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The question is why did the the district atourney settle with Adscend for 100k? Was the governments case THAT flimsy?
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I take it you didn't read the article and just came here to take a stab at Google as a freshmade account of that same old sockpuppeteer.
It was exactly Adscend Media that did the clickjacking, that's why they were sued (not just 'blamed'). Did you miss the part where "affiliate" means "closely related", unlike, you know, customer-provider relations of AdSense user with Google?
I do hope your backing accounts that modded this up get their due through metamoderation.
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They won't, because metamoderation doesn't work like that any more.
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Yet it is not a problem for Google, because it violates the AdSense program policies [google.com], 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 ot
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"Defendants create and provide their affiliates with technology that is designed to deceive Facebook users into visiting websites that pay defendants for the referral traffic. Defendants encourage and pay their affiliates to create Facebook pages that are titled and designed to 'bait' users into visiting other websites,"
The world cators to con-artitst (Score:5, Interesting)
Banks crash the world economy selling junk loans, get 400 billion.
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Where do the spammers get the money from?
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Greetings, I'm an angel investor who manages a mutual fund derived from baby boomer pensions and union fees. I would like to know more about your investment ideas. Call me!
Re:The world cators to con-artitst (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, you have to work on Wall Street from the inside. But every time there's a bull market in either stocks or housing, there should be another opportunity to hire "the smartest people in the room" who construct "fail-safe" financial instruments and strategies that nobody can understand, eventually managing to lose every cent of OPM (and require taxpayer bailouts) while raking in 8 or 9 figures USD for themselves for at least a few peak years.
Makes these spammers look like amateurs.
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Spammers like these are armatures. Take my life please.
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Plain ole regular ones.
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Idiots buy junk loans and crash the world economy.
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That is a moronic comment. It's just like saying "Only idiots trust their doctors for medical advice".
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Many doctors now get trips and free drugs from pharmaceutical companies to push their particular form of drugs.
So. No. I do not blindly trust them. They are no longer what they once were.
When people paid for their own medical care Doctors needed to take oaths and be serious about them. Doctors were held up on a pedestal and at the time deservedly so. Now they are owned by Medicare, HMOs, and Drug companies. They are doing commercials pushing diet aids and herbal remedies to make your dick bigger. They now m
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But it is not the same cost.
Or even close. Because of crap like this insurance rates are an order of magnitude higher than they need to be.
If we went back to people paying for their care we would be more prudent with the money we are spending.
Insurance as it currently is is a cluster fuck of regulations and spending. Government is just going to make it worse.
Fixed that for you... (Score:1)
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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 t
Re:The world cators to con-artitst (Score:5, Interesting)
Yet someone who downloads a couple of CDs pays a 1 Million fine
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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I'll sell mine for $1M.
Provocative "Like" Buttons? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Bad summary? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Bad summary? (Score:5, Funny)
They didn't "make" 20 million.
Hey, let's be fair. The summary didn't say they made 20 million. It said they made "up to" 20 million. "Up to" just means "less than".
I have up to a billion dollars in my pocket.
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I have up to a billion dollars in my pocket.
Do you have up to a billion dollars in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
Re:Bad summary? (Score:5, Insightful)
So you're saying that crime having a 95% return is OK?
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Re:Bad summary? (Score:5, Funny)
So they were hit with a 5% fine
So, from the PoV of a scammer the government is on par with real estate agents.
Better to ask forgiveness... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Moral of the story (Score:5, Insightful)
Only in america.
So what was Facebook's take? (Score:2)
I want to know what Facebook's share of the loot was and how Facebook profited from this.
Why does it seem like the small government imposed fine was small intentionally so that the larger part of the penalty could be a settlement with Facebook?
Which in my mind smells like Facebook profiting on their own complaint, which is a pretty sweet deal when you can complain to the government about somebody gaming your system (and hence, depriving you of a cut) and then get the government to basically recover your los
This is why all anti-spam laws are a joke (Score:2)
Second, the non-obvious reason: Facebook are spammers. But we don't see any AG going after th
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I don't get it: how is Facebook a spammer? You have to actually go to their site to do anything, though many third-party sites put FB's "like" button on their news articles or whatever, but that's their right. A "spammer" is someone who forces their advertising on you whether you want it or not, without asking first or getting you to ask for it.
The unfortunate truth (Score:1)
The same goes for these new, legitimate news readers that tell which articles your friends read on Gua
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You have to watch out for those "legitimate" news outlets. I clicked on an app for News of the World and they started recording and rebroadcasting all the calls going through my cell phone.
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There's a whole industry spamming social (Score:5, Informative)
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". [youtube.com] 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" [sitetruth.com] 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.
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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.
If you're artificially inflating the user counts of Google+, Google is likely on your side, since they're doing that anyway.
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Don't knock these outsource support services. There's no way I could post as often on Slashdot and maintain my good Karma without a lot help from my virtual team based in Calcutta.
100K out of (up to) 20 mil? (Score:1)
Sounds like a minor service charge in the cost of doing business. The Govt. seems to be acting like a mafia racket where they don't want to thwart this activity, they just want a slice of the pie.
A Tax (Score:2)
So when did legal fines turn into taxes on illegal operations.
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They don't have to. Most sitting judges these days want to get paid more by working for the private arbitration firms, and the best way to land one of those gigs is to have a steady track record of screwing consumers and siding with business in every ruling. Consumers never insist that their corporate suppliers of goods and services include binding arbitration clauses in their contracts. Arbitrators work for business, not consumers, and everybody knows it.
Anybody else getting the feeling... (Score:2)
They Spent the Money (Score:2)