Detection of spam tipping behaviour on foursquare

In Foursquare, one of the currently most popular online location based social networking sites (LBSNs), users may not only check-in at specific venues but also post comments (or tips), sharing their opinions and previous experiences at the corresponding physical places. Foursquare tips, which are visible to everyone, provide venue owners with valuable user feedback besides helping other users to make an opinion about the specific venue. However, they have been the target of spamming activity by users who exploit this feature to spread tips with unrelated content. In this paper, we present what, to our knowledge, is the first effort to identify and analyze different patterns of tip spamming activity in Foursquare, with the goal of developing automatic tools to detect users who post spam tips - tip spammers. A manual investigation of a real dataset collected from Foursquare led us to identify four categories of spamming behavior, viz. Advertising/Spam, Self-promotion, Abusive and Malicious. We then applied machine learning techniques, jointly with a selected set of user, social and tip's content features associated with each user, to develop automatic detection tools. Our experimental results indicate that we are able to not only correctly distinguish legitimate users from tip spammers with high accuracy (89.76%) but also correctly identify a large fraction (at least 78.88%) of spammers in each identified category.