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Comment by aikah | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand, when Facebook sends a SMS for validation, can't they check from what country the number is?

If a person registers as an American while being in the Philippines , they could improve their security checks and ask for more details. For instance.

Seems to me ultimately Facebook needs these fake profiles so it can inflate its user base and its ads revenue. Isn't it what people call "growth hacking?"

Interesting article nevertheless. I don't condemn what these folks oversea are doing. It's not hacking, nor extortion , it's obviously some form of spam and against Facebook TOS but I prefer people working in these "digital sweatshops" rather than selling drugs , working in brick factories or prostitution.

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You can register as whatever you want and after verification change it to American.

There has been very little incentive to verify any accounts when part of the selling point of your platform is "we have x billions of active accounts", where or not the accounts are real.

Especially bearing in mind that these figures affect the actual amounts of $$ that advertisers are charged!

Not really true. Spam accounts degrade the quality of the experience, leading to an eventual collapse of real users.

It's more a matter of long term vs short term incentives. Focusing on the short term might lead a fly by night startup to boost user counts unscrupulously, but FB is focused on long term sustainable growth.

I think they give "long term sustainable growth" a lot of lip service, but what they're actually focused on is "as much outwardly-seeming growth as can be manufactured via whatever means possible". This is why they're slash-and-burning their way into "developing markets" with projects like internet.org: they're the only parts of the world left that they haven't sucked dry.

>Not really true. Spam accounts degrade the quality of the experience, leading to an eventual collapse of real users.

You say it isn't true, then describe the scenario that is actually happening today, described in this article: a lower quality experience for users and advertisers. The problem exists because of misaligned incentives. Sure, if advertising and users growth plummet due to the problem, Facebook will be forced to do something. But it's happening now and little is being done.

The spam accounts are not new. I worked for a relatively successful gaming company during the social gaming goldrush a few years ago. While doing some research into cheating in our game, we looked at trying to determine players who were using multiple accounts. We figured that close to half of the daily user accounts were fake. Half.

Hell, each of us had multiple accounts ourselves, since we did a lot of testing and market-research, and didn't want to inundate our real-life streams with spammy game updates.

Of course, when the value of your company rests on those DAU figures, no one is going to talk about it. Just report what it says.

As far as fake profiles and "growth hacking" go, I bet FB has solved for the optimal per cent of fake profiles. Above this amount, FB brand suffers, below this level ad revenues suffer. They probably also factor in the cost of effectively keeping fake profile below this threshold. That's not to say FB encourages or promote fake profiles, I just think they've studied it a lot more intensely than most of us commenters have. And given their size, few have a greater economic incentive than them to fully understand the problem.

These people use US based proxies and US registered SIM cards. From Facebook's point of view they are in the US.

Are you sure about US registered SIM cards? That would be a big security problem as well.

Why is it a security problem that a U.S. SIM card works in the Philippines?

Terrorists can get access of a U.S. SIM card and use it for communication, when someone sees the number, they will think its a U.S. number. I mean, it adds another layer of difficulty in tracing it back to the user. May be I am wrong.

Assuming the telcos are on the hook for the US govt, it probably narrows things down a whole lot more when a US sim connects to a tower in the Philippines

If the worst thing terrorists are doing is fooling me into thinking an incoming call is from Iowa, I'm good with that.

This is hilsriously silly. You can buy US SIMs anywhere in the world with no registration. https://www.readysim.com/

SIM is not a national identity card scheme. Also, caller ID is entirely spoofable - this is something of a problem for fake SWAT calls.

I see.

From the readysim site:

>> For military and law enforcement personnel engaged in covert or undercover activities, Ready SIM offers voice, text, and even email communications.

But that makes it easy for the terrorists too, to do covert operations and hide their identities.

Also, it probably only works _in_ the US, even though you can order it _from_ anywhere.

When companies like Facebook send SMS they do it through a third party provider who talks to the operators (e.g. Twilio). To Facebook, all that is just a black box - if they are lucky they get a callback saying the message has been delivered, but that's usually about it. It's not possible unless you have cooperation with each of the telecom operators to find out where that number is currently registered (i.e. which base station).

Even then as with everything telecoms related, everyone does things slightly differently. They would need to reimplement it for every single operator - even then I doubt it would be 100% accurate, especially once you take roaming into account.

Doesn't Facebook see the country code of the phone number on the registration page?

Perhaps they are U.S. numbers with support for overseas roaming. Only the carrier would know the final location.

I'm curious how they can do this so cheaply though. Maybe they're using a sketchy carrier that FB could flag for further review.

Hmm, I guess they could buy prepaid SIM cards in bulk from all over the world.

With U.S. numbers though?

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