Facebook cracks down on fake ‘likes’

Don’t fall for dodgy deals offering your business hundreds of fake ‘likes’ – you may be forking out the money for nothing in return.

Facebook has said it is making “big strides” against fraudulent activity on the platform, including cracking down on those selling fake ‘likes’.

The social network said in a blog post new advances in its pattern recognition technologies have helped it “halt many of the major exchanges that promote fake like activity on Facebook originating from click farms, fake accounts and malware”.

“When we see suspicious patterns of likes coming from or to a specific account, we thoroughly investigate the situation in order to determine whether there is fraudulent activity taking place,” said Facebook.

Over the last six months, Facebook said it has tripled the number of likes it has detected and has blocked them before they ever reached a page.

“Because of this effort, a large number of the vendors that were attempting to sell inauthentic likes to Facebook Page administrators have closed their businesses,” Facebook said.

“We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: don’t buy fraudulent likes! They may be tempting, but fraudulent likes are going to do more harm than good for your Page.”