Pay Me and I'll Follow You: Detection of Crowdturfing Following Activities in Microblog Environment

A number of existing works have focused on the problem of malicious following activity detection in microblog services. However, most of them make the assumption that the spamming following relationships are either from fraudulent accounts or compromised legitimate users. They therefore developed detection methodologies based on the features derived from this assumption. Recently, a new type of malicious crowdturfing following relationship is provided by the follower market, called voluntary following. Followers who provide voluntary following services (or named volowers) are normal users who are willing to trade their following activities for profit. Since most of their behaviors follow normal patterns, it is difficult for existing methods to detect volowers and their corresponding customers. In this work, we try to solve the voluntary following problem through a newly proposed detection method named DetectVC. This method incorporates both structure information in user following behavior graphs and prior knowledge collected from follower markets. Experimental results on large scale practical microblog data set show that DetectVC is able to detect volowers and their customers simultaneously and it also significantly outperforms existing solutions.