Characterizing key stakeholders in an online black-hat marketplace

Shehroze Farooqi, Guillaume Jourjon, Muhammad Ikram, Mohamed Ali Kaafar, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Zubair Shafiq, Arik Friedman, Fareed Zaffar
2017 2017 APWG Symposium on Electronic Crime Research (eCrime)  
Over the past few years, many black-hat marketplaces have emerged that facilitate access to reputation manipulation services such as fake Facebook likes, fraudulent search engine optimization (SEO), or bogus Amazon reviews. In order to deploy effective technical and legal countermeasures, it is important to understand how these black-hat marketplaces operate, shedding light on the services they offer, who is selling, who is buying, what are they buying, who is more successful, why are they
more » ... ssful, etc. Toward this goal, in this paper, we present a detailed micro-economic analysis of a popular online black-hat marketplace, namely, SEOClerks.com. As the site provides nonanonymized transaction information, we set to analyze selling and buying behavior of individual users, propose a strategy to identify key users, and study their tactics as compared to other (non-key) users. We find that key users: (1) are mostly located in Asian countries, (2) are focused more on selling black-hat SEO services, (3) tend to list more lower priced services, and (4) sometimes buy services from other sellers and then sell at higher prices. Finally, we discuss the implications of our analysis with respect to devising effective economic and legal intervention strategies against marketplace operators and key users.
doi:10.1109/ecrime.2017.7945050 dblp:conf/ecrime/FarooqiJIKCSFZ17 fatcat:4lx4ipdc6zbg5ei4ragn3czt5a