It may seem strange that people would be willing to spend money on fake likes on Facebook, but it is a big enough problem that Facebook has been forced to continuously create new systems to combat organizations that sell fraudulent likes.

“Keeping activity authentic on Facebook is an important part of our ongoing efforts to make sure Facebook is a trustworthy place for people and businesses to connect,” Facebook’s Huseyin Kerem Cevahir wrote in a blog post on Friday. Cevahir said that Facebook has made “big strides in the past six months” in the fight against fraudulent activity on the social network.

One way that Facebook catches fake likes is through pattern recognition systems that detect “suspicious patterns of likes,” leading to more thorough investigations of suspected accounts. The site also alerts page admins whenever fake likes are blocked or removed from their Facebook Page, letting the admins know that purchased likes do not go unnoticed.

“This work has made it extremely difficult for the people selling fraudulent likes to actually deliver their promised likes to paying customers,” Cevahir wrote. “In fact, over the the last six months, we’ve tripled the number of likes we’ve detected and blocked before they ever reached a Page.”

Cevahir noted that several like-selling businesses were forced to close as a result of this system.

Why buy likes?

For the average user, likes represent little more than an arbitrary number showing how many friends enjoyed a status update or photo, but for the creators of Facebook Pages, likes have more value.

Over the last few years, social media has transitioned from a convenient way to keep in touch with friends to a massive multimedia communications platform that can reach more people than ever before.

Facebook alone boasts over 1.3 billion users, and because of this, it has become one of the primary targets for marketers to reach potential customers. A high number of likes can make ads or commercial pages appear more legitimate or popular than they actually are,  and according to Cevahir, the site has had to block or remove fake likes from over 200,000 pages.

“We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: don’t buy fraudulent likes!” Cevahir wrote. “They may be tempting, but fraudulent likes are going to do more harm than good for your Page.”

Image credit: “Facebook Headquarters Entrance Sign Menlo Park” by LPS.1 – Own work. Licensed under CC0 via Wikimedia Commons.