A new website launched today by the University of Cambridge reveals the fluctuating costs involved in building a bot army across more than 500 social media and commercial platforms worldwide. Covering services from TikTok and Amazon to Spotify, and spanning every country, the site tracks daily price changes in the market for fake online accounts, exposing the economic infrastructure behind large-scale online manipulation.
The platform, known as the Cambridge Online Trust and Safety Index (COTSI), allows the public for the first time to monitor real-time market data from what researchers describe as the “online manipulation economy. Developed by the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab, COTSI focuses on SIM farms and related services that mass-produce phone numbers and SMS verifications used to create fake accounts. These services openly sell access to hundreds of platforms, enabling activities ranging from artificial popularity boosts and rage-bait content to coordinated influence operations.
A new study, published in the journal Science and based on 12 months of COTSI data, shows how national regulations shape the prices of fake accounts. Verifying accounts for use in the United States and the United Kingdom is almost as cheap as in Russia, despite their very different regulatory environments. By contrast, Japan and Australia have far higher prices, mainly due to stricter SIM card rules, higher costs and photo identification requirements. During the study period running to July 2025, the average price of SMS verification was $4.93 in Japan and $3.24 in Australia, compared with just $0.26 in the US, $0.10 in the UK and $0.08 in Russia.
The analysis also suggests that political events can be detected in these markets. Prices for fake accounts on messaging apps such as Telegram and WhatsApp tend to rise sharply in countries approaching national elections, indicating increased demand linked to influence campaigns. Examining 61 elections held worldwide between mid-2024 and mid-2025, the researchers found that Telegram account prices rose by an average of 12 per cent and WhatsApp by 15 per cent in the month before polling day. Because these platforms display phone numbers and show the country of origin, influence operations often require locally registered accounts, driving up demand for SMS verification.
To build the index, researchers collected open-source data from major providers of fake accounts. Seventeen vendors were identified and ranked by traffic, with prices from the largest used to construct a global index that tracks both cost and availability. COTSI monitors the stockpiles of fake accounts across social media, messaging services, dating and gaming apps, cryptocurrency exchanges, ride-hailing platforms, streaming services, and major brands. The data show particularly high availability for platforms such as X, Uber, Discord, Amazon, Tinder and Steam, with millions of verifications listed for countries including the US, the UK, Brazil and Canada.
The researchers argue that the fake account economy depends on a critical vulnerability: every account requires a phone number and a SIM card. This creates a potential policy choke point. By making SIM cards more complex or more expensive to obtain, governments could raise the cost of online manipulation and suppress malicious activity. By turning a hidden global market into measurable data, the COTSI index aims to help policymakers and platforms better understand, and ultimately disrupt, the business models that sustain bot armies and online manipulation.
More information: Anton Dek et al, Mapping the online manipulation economy, Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.adw8154
Journal information: Science Provided by University of Cambridge