What Slobozhenko was probably really doing

How the business that Slobozhenko was involved in actually works.

I see many people write about Slobozhenko’s business, but no one has written how “arbitration” actually works. I was brought to arbitrage forums several years ago when I needed to learn how advertising on Facebook works. These people discuss their affairs without hiding, apparently there is no secret here.

So here it is. If you see intrusive, unpleasant ads on Google - “the fish will bite like crazy,” saggy bellies, mushrooms climbing out of jars and wonderful flashlights that can scare dogs and hammer nails - that’s all of them. Arbitrators. People who are paid as intermediaries for bringing buyers to sellers’ websites (why they advertise exactly this and exactly this way - I don’t know, apparently, such advertising works).

Unlike Google, Facebook bans such advertising. On Facebook, for example, it is prohibited to show the belly “before and after” of a weight loss product, not to mention the penis “before and after” of an enlargement product. But affiliates continue to launch it despite the ban. How?

Advertising on Facebook is launched through the advertising account. If you run ads prohibited by Facebook from your advertising account, then after a while Facebook will block this advertising account.

To continue there are two ways.

Everyone who has registered on Facebook has an advertising account by default. Even if he doesn’t know about it and doesn’t use it. So, have you seen the ads “I’ll rent an account”? This is them. Arbitrators.

For a nominal 300 hryvnia per month (before a full-scale war), they entered the account owner’s advertising account, launched their advertisements prohibited by Facebook, closed the account and moved on to the next one.

Since there are not so many people willing to rent out an account, another method is more often used. Which one exactly?

An arbitrageur buys bots.

Bots are raised by special bot breeders, who initially target bot farms to a particular market where the arbitrator plans to work. To “Burj”, to Russia, to “CIS” and so on. Bots are created in the thousands and tens of thousands, and they must look like real people and match (by first name, last name and publications) the market to which advertising is planned to be launched. After cultivation (the so-called “farming”), which can take several weeks—they work with the bot so that it looks like a real person, then Facebook’s advertising office will not immediately block it—the bot farm is sold to an arbitrator. An arbitrageur buys a bot farm, uses it, then buys the next bot farm. And so on, ad infinitum.

If you see media reports that somewhere “a bot farm of 25,000 accounts has been busted” and a photo of a huge number of calling cards and all sorts of technical crap for connecting them, it’s most likely them. Arbitrators.

I don’t know how it works now, but it worked at the time of my interest in the topic before the full-scale war.

I don’t know if Slobozhenko earned money this way (he was positioned as an arbitrage specialist, and this is how arbitrage specialists earn money). The media reported that he allegedly advertised online casinos and worked “for India.” India is the largest market for Facebook services at the moment, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to have a bot farm worth 25 thousand with names in Hindi, Bengali and Urdu.

We are unlikely to know whether Slobozhenko was actually doing this. If yes, it is not recognized in any case, because for this you can get a refusal to provide services from the Meta company (the company rarely uses this, but does). If not, then all of the above simply does not apply to him.

Clearing the world of bot farms is a good thing in any case, but it is interesting that attention was paid to this profession only when one of its representatives bought a Lamborghini and went abroad as a volunteer.