Thai police arrest three Chinese who kept a click-farm for 500 phones

It is not a secret that there are many things on the Internet, including search results, the position of the application in the catalog, the popularity of goods on the network is kept on purely quantitative indicators. Actually, there are practically no other ways to evaluate the named things. Well, if you need a quantity, then there are people and companies who can give out practically any required indicators - if only the customer would pay. The owners of the catalogs of applications, search and other services try to deal with this kind of cheating and often successfully, but there are always craftsmen who bypass the restrictions by inventing something new.

About click-farms, consisting of hundreds of mobile phones, has long been known. In some cases, these farms are used to improve the ranking of an application in an application directory like Google Play or the App Store. But this is not the only application, similar systems (not only from mobile phones) are used to increase the ranking of sites, posts in social networks or advertisements. This Sunday, Thai police arrested three Chinese who operated a click farm on 500 phones, pursuing their own goals.

These enterprising IT representatives kept the farm in their home on the border with Cambodia. The farm, by the way, is not too big; it consists of only 500 telephones (other farms are known, consisting of thousands of telephones). The police, besides the mobile devices themselves, seized more than 350,000 SIM-cards, SIM-card readers, plus 9 more computers and laptops.
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Initially, the police received information that an illegal call center was operating in this house, which is quite an ordinary violation of the law in Southeast Asia. But the trinity of the Chinese explained that they managed the farm not to deceive telephone subscribers, but to control bots in the Chinese social network WeChat. For the organization and management of this "enterprise" the Chinese were paid by a certain Chinese company. The amount in question is $ 4,403 per month (150,000 baht).



The Chinese have chosen Thailand for the implementation of their plans, since mobile communication is relatively inexpensive in this country, it is cheaper here than in most other countries. An interactive map showing prices for a mobile data packet of a certain size is available here .


500 MB Mobile Data Packet Value in US Dollars

By the way, buying a SIM card in Thailand is the same difficult process as in China (almost). Here, too, they began to demand documents when they bought a SIM card, not only from citizens, but also from foreigners. So far it is unclear how the Chinese managed to get a few hundred thousand SIM.

Probably, imagine what can be done with such a farm in WeChat and how much money can only a user of this messenger. As far as one can understand, the possibilities here are really huge, since the user base numbers almost 900 million people, the overwhelming part of whom are Chinese. The messenger itself was created in 2010 and has been developing very rapidly since then. It is somewhat similar to WhatsApp, for example, there are also groups here that are accessed via an invite. Users cannot track any activity in such groups, but fraud is quite a lot here.

With the help of such farms, as it became known in 2015, you can add likes and views of individual messages. Moreover, a detailed study of markups made it possible to understand that 95% of accounts, at least commercial ones, regularly pay for cheating various indicators. It is difficult for users of ordinary social platforms from Europe and the United States to imagine a situation where the figures for 95% of accounts are artificially high. But in the Chinese messenger this is true.

Almost all the ratings and other indicators are wound here. This applies to ratings of companies, restaurants, online stores, etc. And in many cases, even paying is not necessary: ​​the software platform is vulnerable to cracking, and getting the right performance is not as difficult as it might seem, you only need specialized software that you can order or write yourself.


In addition to cheating accounts of quite legal companies, more dirty tricks are used, such as sending spam and malicious software. This is not so difficult to do here. As for the Chinese, who were arrested in Thailand, they kept an army of bots that were promoting the goods of their client, which were sold in China.

Interestingly, they did not have work permits in another country, in addition, the Chinese broke the law and illegally acquired hundreds of thousands of sims. But the Thai police did not punish them strongly, although they could put all three in jail for five years. Trinity was fined and sentenced to deportation to their homeland, where they are unlikely to be given any penalties. The penalty for the violations referred to above is relatively small - from $ 58 to $ 2936.