An Empirical Study of Spam and Prevention Mechanisms in Online Video Chat Services

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 designed and implemented. Our study indicates that the prevention mechanisms either harm legitimate user experience or can be easily bypassed.