ACM HotMobile 2013 poster: detecting fake check-ins in location-based social networks through honeypot venues

The proliferation of location-based social networks (LBSNs) has offered many conveniences to their participants, such as place recommendation, tracking of friends, monetary rewards from venues visited and a cheap way of advertisement for local businesses. However, users can misuse the offered features and the major threat for the service providers is that of fake check-ins. Users can easily manipulate the localization module of the underlying application and declare their presence in a counterfeit location. The incentives for these behaviors can be both earning monetary rewards as well as virtual rewards. Therefore, while fake check-ins driven from the former motive can cause monetary losses, those aiming in virtual rewards are also harmful. In particular, they can significantly degrade the services offered from the LBSN providers or third parties that make use of these data. In this paper, we propose and analyze a honeypot venue-based solution to tag users who are generating fake spatial information.