Over the past seven months Facebook has intensified its efforts to remove fake “likes” from pages. Over 200,000 “likes” have been removed since March, thanks to “new recognition technologies”. Fake “likes” were dealt with “before they ever reached a page,” Facebook site security engineer H. Kerem Cevahir specified.

“New advances in our pattern recognition technologies helped us halt many of the major exchanges that promote fake like activity on Facebook originating from click farms, fake accounts and malware,” Cevahir wrote in a blog post. “This work has made it extremely difficult for the people selling fraudulent likes to actually deliver their promised likes to paying customers,” he added.

According to Facebook many companies “that were attempting to sell inauthentic likes to Facebook Page administrators have closed their businesses.”