Characterizing Key Stakeholders in an Online Black-Hat Marketplace

TL;DR

This paper provides a detailed economic analysis of an online black-hat marketplace, identifying key user behaviors, geographic distribution, and tactics to inform countermeasures against reputation manipulation services.

Contribution

It offers the first micro-economic characterization of key stakeholders in a black-hat marketplace using transaction data from SEOClerks.com.

Findings

Key users are mainly from Asian countries.

Key users focus on selling black-hat SEO services.

Key users often buy low and sell higher.

Abstract

Over the past few years, many black-hat marketplaces have emerged that facilitate access to reputation manipulation services such as fake Facebook likes, fraudulent search engine optimization (SEO), or bogus Amazon reviews. In order to deploy effective technical and legal countermeasures, it is important to understand how these black-hat marketplaces operate, shedding light on the services they offer, who is selling, who is buying, what are they buying, who is more successful, why are they successful, etc. Toward this goal, in this paper, we present a detailed micro-economic analysis of a popular online black-hat marketplace, namely, SEOClerks.com. As the site provides non-anonymized transaction information, we set to analyze selling and buying behavior of individual users, propose a strategy to identify key users, and study their tactics as compared to other (non-key) users. We find that key users: (1) are mostly located in Asian countries, (2) are focused more on selling black-hat SEO services, (3) tend to list more lower priced services, and (4) sometimes buy services from other sellers and then sell at higher prices. Finally, we discuss the implications of our analysis with respect to devising effective economic and legal intervention strategies against marketplace operators and key users.