What They Do in Shadows: Twitter Underground Follower Market
Anupama Aggarwal, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru

TL;DR
This paper investigates Twitter underground follower markets, characterizing their structure, operations, and the quality of services, and develops a model to identify suspicious followers with high accuracy.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive analysis of Twitter underground markets, including their hierarchy, operational schemes, and introduces a supervised model to detect fake followers.
Findings
Freemium markets have an oligopoly structure with few dominant merchants.
Merchant popularity does not correlate with service quality.
Supervised model achieves 89.2% accuracy in identifying suspicious followers.
Abstract
Internet users and businesses are increasingly using online social networks (OSN) to drive audience traffic and increase their popularity. In order to boost social presence, OSN users need to increase the visibility and reach of their online profile, like - Facebook likes, Twitter followers, Instagram comments and Yelp reviews. For example, an increase in Twitter followers not only improves the audience reach of the user but also boosts the perceived social reputation and popularity. This has led to a scope for an underground market that provides followers, likes, comments, etc. via a network of fraudulent and compromised accounts and various collusion techniques. In this paper, we landscape the underground markets that provide Twitter followers by studying their basic building blocks - merchants, customers and phony followers. We charecterize the services provided by merchants to…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSpam and Phishing Detection · Cybercrime and Law Enforcement Studies · Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining
