China-based companies sued by Facebook for selling fake accounts

For promoting the sale of fake accounts,likes and followers Facebook Inc and its Instagram unit sued four companies and three people based in China. “Fake and inauthentic accounts can be used for spam and phishing campaigns, misinformation campaigns, marketing scams, advertising fraud, and other fraud schemes which are profitable at scale,” Facebook and Instagram alleged. They said fake accounts were also created on Amazon, Apple, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter. Using artificial intelligence to detect fake accounts, Facebook and Instagram disabled 2.1 billion inauthentic accounts from January 2018 through September, “often within minutes of the accounts’ creation,” according to the complaint.