Uncovered a rapidly growing bot network on FB that's actively targeting local town/city Facebook groups. FB has dismissed/ignored my reports. What can we do here?

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Hi. Not sure of the best place for something like this to be posted... apologies if this isn't the best place though.

I'm an admin to one of my cities larger community-run Facebook groups... and a few days ago we started getting multiple-at-a-time join requests by obvious fake profiles.

I didn't think anything of it at first. I simply declined/blocked the request and moved on. A few hours later, a few more attempted joining. I thought it was a bit odd, and then noticed they (along with the previous fake accounts) were all a member of this random Facebook group (allegedly some company based out of Vietnam.) Digging deeper, I noticed all of the accounts also followed the same user account.

It's been a few days of getting bombarded with requests from this group. 4 every few hours. I've been blocking them and reporting their accounts as fake. Facebook has continued to 'review the report', coming back that the accounts don't break any community standards.

All of the accounts follow a similar pattern. They all change their cover photo, and then upload a picture of an attractive women. The oddness of it all, is that when researching this group (who is growing at 10k a day of fake accounts...) they're all 'from' various local towns and cities in various states.

Examples:

Lives in Peoria, Illinois...

From Kansas City, Missouri

Rapid City, South Dakota

Studied at San Bernardino, California

Went to Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Lives in Portland, Oregon

From Durham, North Carolina

I've seen similar bot accounts on Twitter, and Instagram... but they're typically pushing a malicious link or something. These accounts are being created and lying dormant. They don't seem to be spreading any content yet.

It's eerily similar to stuff that was discovered during the Mueller investigation. Fake accounts joining groups, that would be later used to spread discourse, or misinformation.

I'm curious if anybody has had any real experience dealing with something similar, and if they've had any experience in contacting Facebook to get them pay any actual attention to it.

Just a handful of these accounts. All of which are clearly fake accounts.

FB / johnie.gambino FB / sari.scudder FB / shameka.trapp.3 FB / chantell.spradlin FB / kelley.marr.5 FB / juliane.isham FB / louanne.rhee FB / beth.irwin.3388 FB / noel.radke.3 FB / joette.saito FB / karren.maravilla.73 FB / kittie.robin FB / majorie.heil FB / allene.culpepper FB / inez.watt.3 FB / sang.gant FB / gerda.kidd.9 FB / nikole.bogue.9

Any ideas on how what to do here?



Submitted November 29, 2019 at 11:31PM by hlve https://ift.tt/2spKWna

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