Online video-on-demand(VoD) services invariably maintain a view count for
each video they serve, and it has become an important currency for various
stakeholders, from viewers, to content owners, advertizers, and the online
service providers themselves. There is often significant financial incentive to
use a robot (or a botnet) to artificially create fake views. How can we detect
the fake views? Can we detect them (and stop them) using online algorithms as
they occur? What is the extent of fake views with current VoD service
providers? These are the questions we study in the paper. We develop some
algorithms and show that they are quite effective for this problem.Comment: 25 pages, 15 figure
