Original article: Below the Iceberg: The Dark World of the Internet

As a representative product of the WEB2.0 era, Weibo has easily killed Blog and pushed BBS to the edge of social networking. However, since the birth of Weibo, a gray industrial chain has also been quietly growing, and this is the zombie fan industry.

Zombie fans originated from big Vs, flourished due to social marketing, and died due to official purges; it is like some kind of stubborn disease or parasite that cannot be extinguished by wildfire but will spring up again in the spring breeze. If one day there is not a single zombie fan left on Weibo, then it can almost be asserted that its end is near. Zombie fans helped Weibo achieve prosperity faster, but they also eroded its value, destroyed the original user ecosystem, and became a tool for a few people to make money. When the afterglow fades, the countless bones behind it will be exposed.

The initial zombie fans were basically achieved through script registration, and these scripts can now be easily searched on the Internet. Through these scripts, a large number of Weibo accounts can be obtained in a short period of time. However, these accounts are all new accounts without any content. It takes a lot of time, energy and manpower to improve the account content, so the initial zombie fans are easy to identify. The content of their accounts is almost the same - blank.

This situation has happened to many people on Weibo. They accidentally found that they followed someone on Weibo, but they couldn’t remember when they followed him, and the content they read was not what they would be interested in at all. If you have encountered this, then congratulations, you have been infected by "zombies".

You will find that many websites or APPs allow you to log in using a Weibo account when registering. When you log in through Weibo, the Weibo API interface will be automatically called and your accessToken, which is the "authorization permission", will be left, allowing the other party to operate your Weibo within a certain period. If you do not authorize again after this period, the accessToken will be automatically destroyed; but during this period, your Weibo may become a zombie fan, and the other party can operate your Weibo to follow anyone.

You must have seen these contents on various SNS platforms: "Fortune forecast for the 12 zodiac signs this year", "Repost this Bodhisattva picture to gain good fortune for a year", "You must read this if you love your parents", "Girls with cold hands were angels with broken wings in their previous life", "Top 10 must-eat fruits for weight loss", "Urgent! XXX is lost at XX location and needs help", "If you don't forward this after reading, your whole family will die", etc., etc. These contents often attract the attention and reposting of countless people who are unaware of the truth, which can be said to be a magical skill for attracting fans.

Most of the publishers of these contents are accounts sponsored by marketing companies. In this way, they can quickly accumulate fans in a short period of time, develop grassroots accounts, and ultimately achieve commercial monetization by directing traffic.

The above is Baidu Encyclopedia’s definition of the “cash-grabbing party”. Currently, the “cash-grabbing party” has formed a clear organizational scale, and retail investors are not included in this category. The freeloaders have also adopted the means of groupization, forming a complete industrial chain from freeloading to cashing in. Many companies, especially large companies at the BAT level, have fallen into the hands of the freeloaders.

The favorite of the "freeloaders" used to be e-commerce because it could cash out the fastest. Now they focus on the field of Internet finance because it is directly in cash. Websites such as online loan freeloaders have emerged to provide first-hand information and benefits to the "freeloaders".

In the era of e-commerce shopping, whenever major e-commerce websites launch activities such as earning points for consumption and credit card consumption benefits, the freeloaders will be quick to register accounts in batches, make low-limit purchases, get a large number of points or benefits, and then redeem them for shopping cards and other voucher products. Now you know where the shopping cards that companies give out during festivals come from, right?

After the rise of Internet finance, the wool-pulling parties have entered the vertical field and dug deep, carrying out this great movement of wool-pulling to the end, and many P2Ps have suffered greatly from it. It is calculated that the wealthy and powerful throw out hundreds of thousands of dollars, and eight out of ten of them are taken away by the freeloaders. The backend data is booming, and the event planners are complacent, not knowing that what is left is only a pile of freeloaders.

The activities of P2P companies already have a very high threshold, requiring binding of email addresses, mobile phone numbers, ID cards, and bank cards. However, the devil is always one step ahead of the saint, and there are still countless P2P platforms, especially P2SP platforms, that have been hacked. The vast majority of P2SP platforms in China seek guarantee from Huifu Tianxia. Huifu Tianxia's real-name system has a fatal BUG, ​​and the wool-gathering parties have made a fortune by taking advantage of this BUG. Under normal circumstances, the ID card-bank card verification system can ensure that each person's ID number can only correspond to his or her own bank card, but the bug in Huifu Tianxia is that the system cannot detect duplicate names. In other words, if you can get 1,000 ID numbers of people named "Wang Gang", you can bind them all to a bank card with the account name "Wang Gang". This is not difficult in the domestic Internet environment where ID card number leakage is serious. By taking advantage of this, ten or twenty yuan can be earned from each account. Once batch operations are carried out, the profits will be considerable.

Some of the more famous cases of traffic hijacking include: 360 tampering with the search drop-down window to hijack Baidu traffic.

Normally, traffic hijacking is done by individuals or small organizations, more than 80% of which are caused by operators' subordinate departments or individuals making black money; in some cases, it is caused by intrusion by third-party organizations. These people can easily make huge profits through traffic distribution. They sell traffic to other websites on a CPM basis. The price is generally much lower than regular traffic. Website operators are also happy to receive this kind of traffic because it is cheap, accurately positioned, and large enough.

The implementation methods of traffic hijacking are also constantly evolving. From the earliest Hub sniffing to the current router intrusion, they are all based on technical means. If you are interested, you can search on Baidu. I have poor technical skills, so I will not make too much analysis.

From a macro perspective, people browsing the web generate billions of PVs every day. Diverting a very small portion of this massive amount of PVs will have almost no impact on the market; but for a certain website, millions of PVs a day is already a considerable number. Especially some informal websites, such as pornographic and gambling websites, they cannot obtain traffic through conventional channels, and hijacking traffic becomes their best option. For these websites, even if only one thousandth or one ten-thousandth of the millions of PVs are converted, their profits will still be huge. For traffic hijackers, with a traffic price of 5-10 yuan/M, it is very easy to make tens of thousands or even millions of profits every day.

Traffic hijacking is like making a hole in the traffic pipe, allowing a small portion of the traffic to flow into the target website. The most popular website is the e-commerce rebate alliance. Rebate alliance websites are basically based on the direct sales model, connecting customers and merchants as intermediaries, and customers will receive rebates when they consume at merchants. This direct sales model has not been classified as illegal in China. Compared with pyramid schemes, it still has a glimmer of truth. Both direct selling and pyramid selling work by giving consumers producer attributes and encouraging them to continuously recommend others to consume through rebates and commissions, thus forming a hierarchical development at an extremely fast speed. This will lead to more and more people using coaxing and deceiving means to induce others to consume, which violates the business logic that is based on products and services. Therefore, the hijacker will direct traffic to such websites. If users consume on the websites, the hijacker can easily obtain rebates. With the support of the traffic volume, this model becomes highly profitable.