“Spammers posting links on Facebook fan pages to send people to third-party scam sites are earning $200m every year, according to calculations by a team of Italian security researchers who have investigated hundreds of thousands of posts on the social network. Trying to catch and get rid of the spammers is a growing problem for Facebook. The revenue that the spammers do not form part of Facebook’s revenue, but instead piggyback on the success of the social network, which now has more than a billion users worldwide. In April, the Italian team uncovered the multimillion-pound business of selling fake Twitter followers, estimating then that as many as 20m were created by spammers.”
