Bangladesh is among favourite locations for Facebook spammers

Bangladesh is among the countries that appear to be of Facebook spammers’ locations of choice to create fake accounts, according to a USA TODAY report.

The newspaper reported on Friday that its parent company Gannett Co asked the FBI to investigate the fake accounts that accounted for half of the newspaper’s Facebook page followers.

Facebook purged millions of those fake accounts from USA TODAY and other publishers three weeks ago in the latest salvo in the social media giant’s battle against scammers and spammers.

The axed accounts included more than a third of USA TODAY’s approximately 15.2 million Facebook 'likes' at the time.

Executives of Gannett Co that owns USA TODAY and 109 local news properties, however, say millions of its remaining followers on the social network site also were fake.

It continues to accumulate a thousand phony followers a day.

One batch of fake accounts featured posters that appeared to be in countries such as Bangladesh, India, Egypt and Pakistan, often with comments written in Bangla, Hindi, Urdu and Arabic, the report said.

"These appear to be manually created accounts, as opposed to accounts created by software, suggesting somewhere in the world humans are busy setting up these profiles. These are made to look more realistic by adding likes and friends, though their comments can look like spam and are often just copied text from random sources," it said.

Quoting a Facebook statement given earlier, the USA TODAY said in the spam operation the social media site tried to purge in mid-April appeared to come from accounts located in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and other countries.

Many Facebook users in Bangladesh found their accounts closed down following a verification process during the operation.

Later, State Minister for Telecom Tarana Halim said the Facebook authorities were closing down fake accounts and pages created using names of Bangladeshi VIPs.

She did not mention any number but said that there were many such accounts.

The phony accounts are not only causing confusion and havoc for individual users and companies, but those have also caused tragedy, such as the torture and killing of a university student in Pakistan after someone set up a fake Facebook account in his name that allegedly contained blasphemous content.