Facebook breaks up fake account operation

SAN FRANCISCO Facebook said Friday it has disrupted an extensive fake account scam operation that targeted popular publishers’ pages with false “likes” in an attempt to fraudulently gain more Facebook friends the scammers later planned to spam.

The company has been fighting the spam operation for six months, Shabnam Shaik, a technical program manager at Facebook, wrote Friday in a post on its security blog.

The unknown group behind the effort had created large numbers of fake accounts, which then “liked” the publishers’ pages and posted comments on them.

The accounts were made to appear as though they were located in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and a number of other countries, Shaik wrote.

The campaign did not appear to have been activated yet, as the bulk of the accounts went dormant after liking a number of Facebook pages, Shaik wrote. This suggests “they had not been mobilized yet to actually make connections and send spam to those people.” Facebook did not say which publishers were targeted.