Facebook Inc. said it has busted a major international spam network that was manipulating “likes” on social networking giant’s pages for over six months.

The unnamed group, which is claimed to have involved accounts in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and a number of other countries, was generating activity such as likes not through traditional mass account creation methods but by what Facebook describes as “more sophisticated means that try to mask the fact that the accounts are part of the same coordinated operation.”

Facebook Security Manager Shabnam Shaik said in a post on Facebook that the ring had been building a network of friend connections by using the accounts to like and interact with Pages but had not managed to progress to the point of unleashing torrents of spam.

Shalik said that the spammers were caught using Facebook’s internal systems in conjunction with partners. Many of the pages liked were not paying for those likes, with 99 percent of the impacted pages likely to see a drop in likes of less than 3 percent.

“By disrupting the campaign now, we expect that we will prevent this network of spammers from reaching its end goal of sending inauthentic material to large numbers of people,” Shalik concluded.

Facebook’s success in taking down an international spam network follows news from earlier last week when the company announced that it took down 30,000 fake accounts in France using the same security tools. The company said at the time that although its security improvements will not result in the removal of every fake account, the company believes its recent changes will reduce the spread of material generated through inauthentic activity, including spam, misinformation or other deceptive content.

Exactly how the new methods work has not been disclosed in detail by Facebook, presumably so those targeting the network with spam can’t find out how they are being detected. But the company’s use of algorithms to detect bot behavior would appear to be paying dividends.

Photo: fbouly/Flickr