Facebook has vowed to "get rid of fake likes as aggressively as possible" from its network.
As announced, Facebook has already won over $2 billion in court judgments against fraudsters who sold fake likes to businesses.
It is now known that many businesses buy likes, with the aim of making their products or brand more popular online.
However, this has the exact opposite effect and business activity can drop significantly online. In fact, as Facebook states, “collecting likes this way does more harm to business than good.”.
As stated in Facebook's security blog, "We have a strong incentive to get rid of fake likes because businesses and the people who use our network want real connections and results, not fake ones."
He even explains that fake like scammers tempt Facebook page administrators to buy, for example, "10,000 likes!".
“To get these likes, fake user accounts are created or in some cases they even hack into personal accounts, so they can use them to get more likes on a page.”
“Since these scams are quite profitable for the businesses that commit them, we will focus on reducing their profits.”
Finally, it is reported that enough has been invested in this effort to find a new algorithm that will prevent such actions.
A study conducted by BBC News in 2012 revealed the extent of the problem of fake likes.
Tech reporter Rory Cellan set up a fake company, VirtualBagel, to see what would happen if he paid to advertise on the network. He eventually discovered that most of the likes his fake company received came from suspicious accounts whose owners would never have been his customers.
