Somewhere in Hanoi, hundreds of smartphones line metal shelves, each blinking as they change screens hundreds of times a minute. Large fans keep the room cool to prevent the devices from overheating.
Each phone runs automatically, liking social media posts, following accounts, watching videos and operating relentless bots on a mission.
Your watching a phone-farm in action and it is just one of many sprouting up in Vietnam that are being used in everything from engaging in massive disinformation campaigns on Facebook to helping Pig Butcherers in Cambodia scale up their operations.
These phone farms are manipulation factories being used to exploit platforms and people.
Min Software – A Hanoi Based Phone Farm That Can Manipulate Anything
Behind very phone farm is sophisticated software that makes the whole operation possible. In Hanoi, one startup called Min Software sells the tools to power thousands of phones.
Min Software touts itself as providing innocuous “Digital Marketing Solutions”, but when you look closer their product names reveal something a bit more sinister. For example, their product MaxCare Facebook is used to manage “large numbers of Facebook accounts” while Max System Care Pro works with phone emulators to “avoid detection.”
The companies website promises to help their clients access increase their business performance by 5-10 times on Facebook, but in reality what they are offering are thousands of bots to like post, add followers.
In Vietnam, a single like on a Facebook post can cost about 3 Vietnamese dong – less than a penny.
Min Software is typically run on low-cost Android phones arranged on custom racks that are all connected to a central power source.
In many cases, the operators use special “Box Phone Farms” that pack 20 motherboards into a single chassis – they strip away the screens and cameras to save space using only the necessary parts of the phone.
The Scam Connection – Crossing A Line Into Fraud And Disinformation Campaigns
Min Software touts itself as a legitimate operation, but a recent documentary by Arte.TV questions just how legitimate the type of activity their involved with is.
The documentary dives into how Phone Farms create and source fake profiles (and in some cases stolen profiles) to run the bots. They don’t implicate Min Software, but they cast shade on how these phone farms in Vietnam are involved in widespread disinformation campaigns.
Check out the fascinating video expose below.
