We all know that Facebook is a very profitable business. However, due to its “overpopulation” of members, it also allows others to make quite a profit, whether they are legitimate businesses or malicious users. According to a team of Italian researchers, spammers and scammers can earn up to $200 million a year using the popular social networking site.
If you look at any large Facebook page (group, or fan-page) you might notice a lot of posts about free products. Facebook's Terms of Serviceforbid this, but the posts continue to exist nonetheless.
URLs are often hidden behind shortening services like Bit.ly or TinyURL, obscuring their true destination. The result is that if someone clicks on them in the hope of winning an easy smartphone or tablet, they don't know exactly where they'll be taken.
Andrea Stroppa and Carlo De Micheli, the two leaders of the research team, tried to define the approximate earnings of Facebook pages that use spam. For a page that has about 30,000 likes, spammers could earn up to $13 with simple ads and without using malicious campaigns. A page with 100,000 likes, earns up to $58 from a post. Now multiply that by the number of posts they make daily, and then calculate the annual earnings.
However, if spammers are greedy, which is not a rare phenomenon, they publish links that lead to malicious pages or sell likes on other pages, thereby essentially boosting their income.
