There Are No Free iPads: An Analysis of Survey Scams as a Business

Spam is a profit-fueled enterprise and cyber-criminals are focusing more of their efforts at growing Online Social Networks, such as Facebook. One of the common methods of monetizing Online Social Network spam is to entice users to click on links promising free gift cards and iPads. However, these links actually lead to ad networks that bombard users with surveys in an attempt to collect personal and contact information that they will sell to other marketers. To date, we lack a solid understanding of this enterprise’s full-structure. In this paper, we examined the survey scam process to determine the affiliates/sponsors that are behind this lucrative scam by performing an analysis of five months of Facebook spam data. We provide the first empirical study and analysis of survey scams and demonstrate how to determine which ad networks are sponsoring this spam.