Exploration of the Dynamics of Buy and Sale of Social Media Accounts

TL;DR

The paper investigates the growing ecosystem of buying and selling social media accounts across five major platforms, revealing a large-scale illicit market with substantial financial value. It introduces a three-module framework to identify both public and underground marketplaces, collect ads and linked profiles, and track scam activities, yielding insights into account setup, engagement, and abuse. The study identifies 38,253 advertised accounts worth over $64 million, analyzes 11,457 visible accounts and 200k+ posts to classify scam types (financial, phishing, impersonation, engagement bait, among others), and assesses platform detection efficacy, which remains low at about 19.7%. It offers concrete recommendations for platforms, payment providers, and policymakers to mitigate risks, and provides data and methodological tools to support ongoing research into illicit account trades at scale.

Abstract

There has been a rise in online platforms facilitating the buying and selling of social media accounts. While the trade of social media profiles is not inherently illegal, social media platforms view such transactions as violations of their policies. They often take action against accounts involved in the misuse of platforms for financial gain. This research conducts a comprehensive analysis of marketplaces that enable the buying and selling of social media accounts. We investigate the economic scale of account trading across five major platforms: X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube. From February to June 2024, we identified 38,253 accounts advertising account sales across 11 online marketplaces, covering 211 distinct categories. The total value of marketed social media accounts exceeded \$64 million, with a median price of \$157 per account. Additionally, we analyzed the profiles of 11,457 visible advertised accounts, collecting their metadata and over 200,000 profile posts. By examining their engagement patterns and account creation methods, we evaluated the fraudulent activities commonly associated with these sold accounts. Our research reveals these marketplaces foster fraudulent activities such as bot farming, harvesting accounts for future fraud, and fraudulent engagement. Such practices pose significant risks to social media users, who are often targeted by fraudulent accounts resembling legitimate profiles and employing social engineering tactics. We highlight social media platform weaknesses in the ability to detect and mitigate such fraudulent accounts, thereby endangering users. Alongside this, we conducted thorough disclosures with the respective platforms and proposed actionable recommendations, including indicators to identify and track these accounts. These measures aim to enhance proactive detection and safeguard users from potential threats.

Figures (5)

• Figure 1: Evaluation Setup – Our evaluation setup comprises three main modules. Initially, we collect marketplaces that sell social media accounts based on manual search (➊). Through semi-automation, we collect data from various marketplaces related to advertised accounts and further query social media APIs to collect data related to the advertised account (➋); finally, we evaluate the collected data by analyzing the marketplace, and their affiliated social media accounts including scam tracking and abusive elements associated with such accounts (➌).
• Figure 2: In this graph, we present the cumulative and active listings advertised by sellers across 11 open marketplaces over our data collection iterations between Feb 2024 to Jun 2024. The decline in active listings suggests that some accounts went offline, possibly due to successful sales or the seller's decision to take them offline. At the same time, the continuous growth in cumulative listings, despite the dip in active ones, reflects the replenishment of inventory to maintain higher stock levels and meet supply and demand needs.
• Figure 3: An example of advertised seller accounts on FameSwap marketplace with exceptionally high prices, the reasons behind such elevated prices remain unclear. The account shows the follower count close million, and the price at $50 million.
• Figure 4: Date of account creation - In this graph, we display visible social media account profiles from 5 social media platforms based on their date of creation date. We identify that 30% of accounts were created before 2020, and less than 0.5% of accounts from YouTube were created between 2006 to 2010.
• Figure 5: Three examples of the profile descriptions of advertised social media accounts.