Click Farms: How Warehouses of Phones Manipulate the Web

Introduction: The Wall of Phones

If you need 100,000 fake reviews on a product, a single script on a computer won't work—Amazon will ban the IP immediately. To get around this, fraudsters build Click Farms. These are literal warehouses filled with walls of thousands of cheap, physical smartphones plugged into massive USB hubs.

The Cellular Network Trick

The secret to a click farm is the IP address. These phones don't use Wi-Fi. They use hundreds of cheap 4G SIM cards. Every time a phone 'likes' a post, it turns Airplane Mode on and off. The telecom provider gives it a brand new, legitimate 4G IP address. To the social media company, it looks exactly like 100,000 real people walking around a city.

Conclusion

Click farms combine physical hardware with mobile IP rotation to create the most difficult-to-detect fraud on the internet. See if you are part of a botnet here.