Abstract

Online social networks serve as a promising platform for social eliteness and financial gain. With such a promise or dream, zombie accounts, behind which stand no real users, become prevalent. The detection of such accounts has been games of cat and mouse, with more and more sophisticated methods used by zombie account managers. In this work, we propose a new zombie account detection technique called ZLOC, Zombie detection using Location information. ZLOC uses the location information of an account’s friends or followers. More specifically, we investigate the follower accounts of suspected zombie accounts in SINA WeiBo, one of the two most popular microblogging websites in China. Our scheme is based on a natural social behavior that many of one’s friends are usually in the vicinity of his/her location. Our analysis shows that the proposed ZLOC scheme has some salient features that help with zombie detection.