According to Brian Krebs of the Krebs on Security newswire, researchers from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have revealed that the systems used to stop automated sign-ups to social networks can be negated using freelance working arrangements.
"Buyers `crowdsource' work by posting jobs they need done, and globally distributed workers bid on projects that they are willing to take on", says Krebs in a security posting.
The researcher quotes Stefan Savage, a UCSD computer science professor who has been studying the problem, as saying that the on-demand, for-hire contract market makes it easy to develop new scams.
The UCSD team, says Krebs, examined almost seven year’s worth of data from freelancer.com, a popular marketplace for those looking for work.
They found that 65-70% of the 84,000+ jobs offered for bidding during that time appeared to be for legitimate work such online content creation and web programming.
The remainder, he noted, centered around four classes of what they termed `dirty' jobs, such as account registration and verification, social network linking - buying friends and followers - search engine optimisation, as well as ad posting plus bulk mailing.
Most of the social networking sites, says Krebs, use technologies like CAPTCHA routines to prevent automated sign-ups, but the use of freelance crowdsourcers easily negates this form of protection.
The trend towards the usage of phone verification of accounts is also becoming freelance crowdsourced, say the researchers, who add that the retail cost of phone verification services can range from 2.5 to 25 cents per call.
And as demand for these new human services continues to increase, the UCSD researchers have stepped in to aggregate the workforce.
Savage told Krebs that the overall demand for social networking links has skyrocketed since the early part of 2010, suggesting that spammers have only recently realised the potential for monetising social links.
"Whether it's to buy friends for a social network or to do phone verification of new accounts, over time if a particular business new business model makes sense, it gets moved out of the freelancer market and into its own stand-alone service", he explained.
Krebs notes that sites such as twitterfollowershop.com and buytwitterfollowers.com charge between $17.00 and $24.95 per 1,000 followers, using crowdsourced labour in the Far East.