Impersonators And Scammers Promoting Porn Websites Flood TikTok, Researcher Found

A Domino Effect can be described as a chain reaction produced when one event sets off similar events. This happens to TikTok in a not surprising way.

According to Satnam Narang, a Senior Security Response Manager at Tenable on his blog posts (1) (2), TikTok has become a place where impersonators and scammers gather and target victims.

Due to the fact that TikTok has a massive growing user base, which surpassed 1 billion downloads back in February 2019, these bad actors are leveraging strategies to grow their followers inorganically by impersonating popular creators and celebrities, and make people to sign up to porn sites.

"Given TikTok’s meteoric rise in popularity, it comes as no surprise that scammers would take notice," wrote Narang. “So far, these scams appear to be in their infancy.”

TikTok has become a place where people impersonate others.

This is nothing new, as social media networks in general have their own bad actors who impersonate others for their own gains, to either garner huge followers and/or to spread misinformation. But on TikTok, most impersonators tend to fake their identities by presenting themselves as popular figures, "for the sake of gaining followers before pivoting to a personal account."

To do this, the impersonator looks for someone who has a huge number of followers, take his/her identity, downloaded his/her videos and re-uploaded them on the impersonator's account.

The impersonator can also use the same video caption, or add/tweak the hashtags accordingly.

To trick other TikTok users to following the impersonator, the impersonation account uses non-standard characters in its username. Like for instance, using an “s” with an accent above it (ś) and an “e” with a macron above it (ē).The impersonator can also claim that the account is a "second" or “backup account” of the true owner.

Salice Rose on TikTok - real and fake
Salice Rose, a popular creator of Vine, YouTube and TikTok videos, is one of many users who has been impersonated on TikTok. Her real TikTok account (left), and the one created by an impersonator (right)

After garnering the number of followers threshold they need, impersonators can simply revert back to their personal account, by first removing all traces of the videos that were stolen and used to gain followers, change the profile bio, and change the profile image.

While these people can get away easily, TikTok only allows users to change their usernames once every 30 days. As a result, many of these impersonators who just pivoted, see their usernames remain intact until their 30 days are up.

According to Narang, impersonators can also use Fan Page to conveniently gain followers.

And making things worse, some of the impersonators' accounts got the "verified account" badge.

From there, these bad actors can promote services, like selling free likes and followers. They target TikTok users, and try to make them download apps, in which the impersonator can earn from the site's Cost-Per-Install (CPI) affiliate program.

Also from here, these impersonators can scam TikTok users to sign in to porn sites.

To get users to sign up for adult-related sites, the scammers first steal videos from popular Instagram and Snapchat accounts that feature women dancing, posing in bikinis, working out or just going about their normal day-to-day lives.

This is because the scammers know that TikTok users are more attracted to see daily-normal activities that are fun and funny, and not porn.

Using this approach, the scammers can also benefit from CPI and Cost-Per-Action (CPA) from adult networks which reward affiliate accounts for bringing new users. The scammers can also use these impersonated accounts to drive TikTok users to a separate accounts, like to Snapchat.

According to the report, the average scam account has about 650 followers and 1,744 likes across videos, with the most successful account scoring “34,000 likes across their videos and […] over 12,300 followers.”

TikTok adult scammers' accounts - number of followers

“We expect these scam activities to only increase as TikTok continues to dominate the Apple App Store marketplace,” Narang added.

Over the years, scammers have flooded most if not all popular platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Tinder, Kik and Snapchat. And TikTok here is just another platform on the list that experiences this problem.

When a platform gained popularity, the next that will come, is scammers. These bad actors won't be far behind when they see a potential platform for their malicious purposes. On different platforms, their tactics may change to suit the users and rules, but at its core, the scams will be the same.

With many of those platforms having hundreds of millions to billions of users, scammers would be all over those places, and will remain there for the foreseeable future.

It is critically important for users of any platform to do their part by reporting fake, abusive, misleading account when they see one.

Read: How ByteDance Wants To Dominate, By Surpassing Facebook, Instagram And YouTube

Published: 
14/08/2019