A result of an eight week study found that Facebook’s fake account detection mechanisms can be easily overcome by 80 percent of the time with the special help of automated tools. The study conducted by researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC).

Yazan Boshmaf together with some of the of programmers such as Ildar Muslukhov, Konstantin Beznosov, and Matei Ripeanu created a network of 102 bots designed to pose as real humans on social networks. The researchers then released the bots on Facebook with the intention of befriending as many users as possible so that it could collect private information about the unsuspecting users.