A new site that tracks the daily fluctuating costs behind building a bot army on over 500 social media and commercial platforms – from TikTok to Amazon and Spotify – in every nation on the planet is launched today by the University of Cambridge.
For the first time, the Cambridge Online Trust and Safety Index (COTSI) allows the global community to monitor real-time market data for the "online manipulation economy": the SIM farms that mass-produce fake accounts for scammers and social bots.
These markets openly sell SMS message verifications for fake profiles across hundreds of sites, providing a service for "inauthentic activity" ranging from vanity metrics boosts and rage-bait accounts to coordinated influence campaigns.
A new analysis using twelve months of COTSI data, published in the journal Science, shows that verifying fake accounts for use in the US and UK is almost as cheap as in Russia, while Japan and Australia have high prices due to SIM costs and photo ID rules.
The average price of SMS verification for an online platform during the year-long study period running to July 2025 was $4.93 in Japan and $3.24 in Australia, yet just a fraction of that in the US ($0.26), UK ($0.10) and Russia ($0.08).*
The research also reveals that prices for fake accounts on Telegram and WhatsApp appear to spike in countries about to have national elections, suggesting a surge in demand due to "influence operations".
The COTSI team, based in Cambridge's Social Decision-Making Lab , includes experts in misinformation and cryptocurrency. They argue that SIM card regulation could help "disincentivise" online manipulation, and say their tool can be used to test policy interventions the world over.
The team suggest that platforms should add labels showing an account's country of origin for transparency, as recently done on X, but also point out such measures can be circumvented – a service provided by many vendors in the study.
"We find a thriving underground market through which inauthentic content, artificial popularity, and political influence campaigns are readily and openly for sale," said Dr Jon Roozenbeek, study co-lead and senior author from the University of Cambridge.
"Bots can be used to generate online attention for selling a product, a celebrity, a political candidate, or an idea. This can be done by simulating grassroots support online, or generating controversy to harvest clicks and game the algorithms."
"All this activity requires fake accounts, and each one starts with a phone number and the SIM hardware to support it. That dependency creates a choke point we can target to gauge the hidden economics of online manipulation."
Co-lead author Anton Dek, a researcher at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, said: "Misinformation is subject to disagreement across the political spectrum. Whatever the nature of inauthentic online activity, much of it is funnelled through this manipulation market, so we can simply follow the money."
Murky global market
To register a new account, online platforms require SMS (Short Message Service) verification: a text message containing a code sent to a valid phone number. This is intended to confirm a human is setting it up.
Over the last decade, a murky global marketplace has emerged with the infrastructure to bypass this security protocol, and automatically generate and sell fake accounts in bulk.
Companies claiming to offer privacy solutions operate "farms" of thousands of SIM cards and SIM banks – both real and virtual – to provide SMS verifications and re-route web traffic though mobile networks to disguise its origin.
Fake accounts bought from this "transnational grey market" of informal businesses, often based in jurisdictions with little legal oversight, are central to online scams.
This market is also behind many malicious bot campaigns now dominating propaganda and PR dark arts, according to Cambridge researchers. "A sophisticated bot can run an influence campaign through hundreds of fake accounts," said Roozenbeek.
"Generative AI means that bots can now adapt messages to appear more human and even tailor them to relate to other accounts. Bot armies are getting more persuasive and harder to spot." For example, a study last year uncovered a botnet of 1,140 accounts on X using generative AI to run automated conversations.
Fake account index
The team built COTSI with opensource data pulled from some of the world's biggest fake account suppliers. Researchers identified seventeen vendors and sorted by traffic to focus on the top ten. Four of these are used at any one time to construct the global price index, with others kept in reserve.
Importantly, COTSI monitors not just prices but also the available "stock" of fake accounts listed by each vendor in every country for hundreds of platforms.
These include all social media channels, as well as cash, dating and gaming apps, cryptocurrency exchanges and sharing economy sites such as AirBnB, music and video streaming services, ride-hailing apps such as Uber, and accounts for major brands such as Nike and McDonald's.
"One SIM card can be used for hundreds of different platforms," said Dek. "Vendors recoup SIM costs by selling high-demand verifications for apps like Facebook and Telegram, then profit from the long tail of other platforms."
Additional analyses show global stocks of fake accounts are highest for platforms such as X, Uber, Discord, Amazon, Tinder and gaming platform Steam, while vendors keep millions of verifications available for the UK and US, along with Brazil and Canada.**
Meta, Grindr, and Shopify rank among platforms with the cheapest fake accounts for sale, at a global average of $0.08 per verification. This is followed by X and Instagram at an average of $0.10 per account, TikTok and LinkedIn at $0.11, and Amazon at $0.12.
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