Fake account farm busted in Thailand

The app and page creators in question can earn advertising revenue based on the popularity of these platforms they have created. To increase their ad revenue, they need to raise their follower, comment, and like metrics to a high level. For this, platform owners can resort to various methods. One of the most commonly used of these methods is fake account fraud.

Among these methods, the one platform owners most often resort to is known as buying followers, comments, and likes. It is known that some people provide this kind of support to many platforms using fake accounts for certain fees.

In Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, as a result of a police raid on a rented house, this system, set up under the name Clickfarm and what could be called modern fraud, was seized. In the house where 3 Chinese men were found, there was a system consisting of exactly 474 iPhone 5S, 5C, and 4S models, controlled by 10 computers to which they were connected. In addition to this system, 347,000 SIM cards, believed to have been bought for use in the devices, were seized.

At the end of the investigations, it was stated that the Clickfarm system that had been set up was established to provide a large bot service to the popular Chinese messaging app. It also emerged that the famous company supplied the phones used for the Clickfarm system and the system itself, and paid the workers $4,500.

This is not the first bot scandal the globally known messaging app WeChat has been involved in. It is known that it previously resorted to such methods to create artificial inflation with fake accounts. It is not yet known how this situation will affect WeChat, the messaging app with more than 700 million users.

According to what was stated, it is thought that the Clickfarm system was set up in Thailand because communication costs there are more affordable. In addition, the 3 people managing the system will be tried and face a five-year prison sentence.