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400,000 SIM card Chinese 'click farm' busted in Thailand

Three Chinese men were detained in Thailand on Tuesday after police discovered they were running a "click farm" from a house near the Cambodian border to generate likes for Chinese products on social media.

The trio was arrested on Sunday after police raided their rental home and discovered a rack of some 500 smart phones hooked up to a computer.
Police also confiscated nearly 400,000 Thai SIM cards allegedly purchased for the operation.

The men, in their late twenties and early thirties, told officers they were hired by Chinese companies to boost "likes" for a number of products, including herbal medicines, candy and a tour company.

"They have been charged with working without work permits because they are on tourist visas and smuggling contraband goods," said immigration officer Colonel Ruengdet Thammana, referring to the mobile phones.

Police decided to search the house after they noticed the men rarely left the building or spoke to other people.

Click farms are just one of many online scams that have proliferated in recent years and become a major scourge for social media giants.

Some farms control tens of thousands of fake social media accounts that can be programmed to like pages or posts.

A typical farm might boast hundreds of phones that scammers swap with different SIM cards registered to many accounts.
Or it might be a loose network of real users liking huge quantities of posts for a fee.

The farms are hired by ordinary people and politicians looking to boost their profiles, companies who want to game ranking algorithms to ensure products are given priority, and fake news writers seeking to get their headlines onto 'most read' lists.

India, the Philippines, Indonesia and China -- all countries with low wages but high tech penetration -- have emerged as key click farm hubs.
Web giants face a constant battle to tweak their algorithms to weed out fake traffic and users.

Last month Facebook said it was making changes to its ranking algorithm to keep its users from linking to "low quality" websites, part of an effort to fight spam and misinformation.

Source: news.abs-cbn.com

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I always thought that running something like this is possible nowadays but managing 400,000 sim cards and 500 smart phones is totally insane. There must be a big market for this kind of service since there are group of people out there willing to do this for a fee. I'm not gonna be surprised if there's one running in this forum.  

How did they managed to purchase 400,000 SIM cards? In my country, it is very tough to get a SIM card. You need to show your ID cards. And if there are more than 4-5 cards issued against your name, then usually the cops will appear at your doorstep. How these guys managed to get 400,000?

I thought of that one too, but I guess Thailand does not regulate use of prepaid sim cards just like here in the Philippines where you can buy sim cards at any store with out the need of an identification card, it's like buying candy from a store. I remember planning to buy a prepaid sim in a 7-11 store in Singapore and they asked me to show my passport, I backed out.

I saw video of thousand cell phones - where they just making views !

400000 SIM cards and only three men? That's insane! It's people like this that brings bad reputation to Asian countries.

Ah, this is epic. What I want to know is how the fuck they were pulling this off. 3 people can't manage this many identies, even peripherally. I feel there was more people involved in this, they might have busted them when the full crew wasn't present.

If anything, these guys get a cookie. In my book, they weren't doing anything illegal, and effort of this caliber always deserves compliment ;)

The data those guys used. Sweet Jesus the data those guys used.

Agreed.  100% cookie for the effort. shame really they could of come up with a fantastic marketing network if they had thought about it and not been pony to these alleged Chinese companies,

Thw law changed a while ago, now you need to register it via id card else the card will not work! I really wonder how he did manage to get them activated because even if you will do a postpaid plan here the goverment verify you.

The only way i could think of is that he have a complice in 7/11 or in a phone shop.

Not far away from my village in sa kaeo, and they used fake iphone's 500 pieces and they had over 700 simcards at least that is what they just said in the local thai news a few moments ago

Such tight control exists only in such totalitarian countries as your Russian. In my country, no problem, you can buy any SIM cards. Mobile operators receive revenues and they are not interested in the spam problem. It is not a violation of the law.

I didn't fully read the story, but is there a direct Bitcoin reference there?  I am not complaining, the forum politics and society thread works for this, but I was curious if I had missed something about Bitcoin in the mix, perhaps the payouts from the clicks were done in Bitcoin or something.

What difference in what currency was the payment for clicks. Anyway, bitcoin can not exist separately from the Fiat money. Everyone who has a bitcoin sooner or later change it into Fiat.

Yes, there are still countries that allow you to buy cards anonymously. It used to be possible in Europe before all that crap with migrants and terrorists. I had 4 cards myself, they costed like 1€ each. I think last year they started blocking unregistered cards, which IMO is an invasion of privacy. I had some of these cards for over 10 years...

A sim card in the Philippines is worth 50 PHP - lowest price - 400,000 sim cards thats tens of millions of pesos. Is that even worth a beef. I mean how much will you earn from having a click farm just for likes and posts. Geesh. World's getting crazy!!

Ukraine SIM cards are $ 1. A passport is required only for contract subscribers. Everyone who uses a prepaid tariff documents for the purchase of SIM cards is not needed. To ensure that people did not acquired a large number of SIM cards all rates with fee so have many SIM cards expensive.

Yeah can confirm in many countries its dead easy to buy a new pay-as-you-go simcard with no ID. No resources to enforce it. Funny story.

Click farms are very profitable businesses. A single click can be worth anywhere between $0.04 and $0.25 (these are the typical rates being paid by Google Adsense. Others pay somewhat less). And using a single SIM, you can do clicks several times every minute.

Yes, because one card can be used multiple times, it's not like it expires after a month or a number of clicks ;) They were planning to run the operation for a long time. If they were doing it for 12h a day, it wasn't hard to earn a couple hundred € a day and keep going for a few years, and in Asia you can get these cards much cheaper. Also, what they were doing wasn't totally illegal and the proof of that is in the charges. If they really had grounds to bust them they wouldn't charge the perpetrators with working without work permits, would they?

Thats why every country should implement strict laws regarding illegal aliens. Because no wonder how they get in the Philippines is because of weak implementation and monitoring. Philippines now is becoming getaway country of different types of criminals hoping the current administration will do something about this.

I don't think that they were illegal aliens. They were legal residents with all the required paper-work. Moreover, Thailand grants visa on arrival for the Chinese nationals. Strict visa rules can negatively affect tourism and business. I would say that having a liberal visa regime is more beneficial, as it brings in a lot of revenue and create new jobs.

I've been hearing about Chinese Like farms before though this is the first article I've actually read about this. I don't think this is that popular in my country. Paid troll are though, especially during elections. I've seen a documentary of it. And of course cybersex cams. If there are any illegal online casinos, it's usually operated by foreigners, mostly the Chinese from the mainland.


Yes, SIM cards are just around 20 pennies a piece here in the Philippines and retailers are not required to take customer information before they sell them. Heck, sometimes they even give them for free. It's also unlikely everyone here will transition to postpaid, which would be easier to track after getting a court order.

There has been several push for more regulation but so far the bills just languish in congress.

That is quite weird. In most of the countries, strict ID verification is required before you can purchase the SIM cards. That is why in the dark market sites such as Alphabay, the SIM cards are in high demand.

Depends on the country some vendors just sell them on the street and you can buy as many as you want, but I guess it really depends on the country social media generating likes I guess is a good way to build reputation unless you get caught doing it of course ^^.
The question is how do you use that many sim cards between three people ... it would take a while in my opinion nice investment into the future though.

These kind of things are also known as sim box fraud  in my country, the perpetrators scams the local service providers and get profits from foreign calls and you will think you are receiving a local call.

Yup, quite weird no? Maybe it's the effect of having a large informal sector. I don't think that even with regulations, that people would be able to stop buying SIMs anonymously. They can just buy SIMs from individuals that have theirs before new regulations are implemented.

IMHO the only way to go is for everyone to be postpaid, with the SIMs imbedded in the phones. That way, you can just arrest anyone trying to sell SIMs.

Sim cards can be deactivated by the provider with one button.

In industry nations it is standard for a while now that you can only register a simcard with your ID.
The old sim cards only work until a certain date.

Reasons are counter terrorism and organized crime.

The asshole politicians in my shithole third world country are taking their time. Funny is that they'd cut off signal during certain festivals to prevent phone detonated bombs but can't pass a legislation requiring people to at least show an ID when buying SIMs. Congress need to be bombed just for them to actually do anything.

Whether the activities they are doing are illegal,
I think logically that the activity is a form of organized fraud, where they do a lie to users of social media and online shopping.
Where the online shop has many of its users and trusted, by paying the services of companies like fake follower, this form of virtual crime that must be eliminated.

I wonder how long it is till some sweatshop gets busted with people shitposting here on bitcointalk with their hundreds of accounts  :D.


You don't need anything in the UK. In fact, some providers will give you them for free because they want your business. There's also the black market.

What would you expect, merch gonna merch.  ;D The ethical issue aside, what would the Thai police charge them with? Would this be considered cybercrime under Thai law? Coz after all, this is not a cybersex den, nor even an illegal online casino. And they're not technically scamming anyone, they were "hired" by business to simply like posts.