Identifying Fraudulently Promoted Online Videos

Fraudulent product promotion online, including online videos, is on the rise. In order to understand and defend against this ill, we engage in the fraudulent video economy for a popular video sharing website, YouTube, and collect a sample of over 3,300 fraudulently promoted videos and 500 bot profiles that promote them. We then characterize fraudulent videos and profiles and train supervised machine learning classifiers that can successfully differentiate fraudulent videos and profiles from legitimate ones.