An Empirical Study of Spam and Prevention Mechanisms in Online Video Chat Services
Xinyu Xing, Junho Ahn, Wenke Lee, Richard Han, Shivakant Mishra

TL;DR
This paper investigates spam propagation in online video chat services, revealing that dating scams are prevalent and highly effective, and analyzes the limitations of existing spam prevention mechanisms.
Contribution
It provides an empirical analysis of spam types, effectiveness, and the shortcomings of current prevention methods in online video chat platforms.
Findings
Dating scams have a clickthrough rate of 14.97%.
Spam in video chats attracts larger user attention than email spam.
Current prevention mechanisms often harm user experience or are bypassable.
Abstract
Recently, online video chat services are becoming increasingly popular. While experiencing tremendous growth, online video chat services have also become yet another spamming target. Unlike spam propagated via traditional medium like emails and social networks, we find that spam propagated via online video chat services is able to draw much larger attention from the users. We have conducted several experiments to investigate spam propagation on Chatroulette - the largest online video chat website. We have found that the largest spam campaign on online video chat websites is dating scams. Our study indicates that spam carrying dating or pharmacy scams have much higher clickthrough rates than email spam carrying the same content. In particular, dating scams reach a clickthrough rate of 14.97%. We also examined and analysed spam prevention mechanisms that online video chat websites have…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSpam and Phishing Detection · Advanced Malware Detection Techniques · User Authentication and Security Systems
