Gaming the Game: Honeypot Venues Against Cheaters in Location-Based Social Networks

The proliferation of Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs) has provided the community with an abundant source of information that can be exploited and used in many different ways. LBSNs offer a number of conveniences to its participants, such as - but not limited to - a list of places in the vicinity of a user, recommendations for an area never explored before provided by other peers, tracking of friends, monetary rewards in the form of special deals from the venues visited as well as a cheap way of advertisement for the latter. However, service convenience and security have followed disjoint paths in LBSNs and users can misuse the offered features.