This was discovered due to the bad actor being incompetent.
Clearly by spending a bit more, or putting in more of an effort using plausible names for every alleged bot vote it could not be detected.
Gathering a list of 400 real names is trivial.
Clearly by spending a bit more, or putting in more of an effort using plausible names for every alleged bot vote it could not be detected.
Gathering a list of 400 real names is trivial.
The FCC fake-comment fraud involved literally millions of real identities and real names [0]. It was caught for a different reason: many of the comments had identical text strings.
[0] https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2023/attorney-general-james-...
It's a very interesting example, to me: the telecom companies set up an arms-length arrangement with the criming entities, the "social media consultants", such that if the fraud were caught (and it was), the people who benefited from the crime, and intended for the crime to happen, could plausibly plead ignorance. US law apparently has no good solution to this type of "wink-and-nod" white-collar crime.
Not at all clear, actually. They wouldn't have been discovered by this exact heuristic, but that's not to say this was the most complex fraud the Hugo committee were capable of detecting.