COTSI: Mapping the economics of online manipulation
The Cambridge Online Trust & Safety Index (COTSI) tracks the daily price and availability of fake SMS verifications across 197 countries and more than 500 online platforms.
Developed with researchers at the University of Cambridge, COTSI makes it possible to observe a market that sits behind fake accounts and coordinated online manipulation.
What Trementum built
Trementum developed the technical infrastructure behind COTSI, turning the research methodology into a continuously updated public data product.
The system automatically collects price and stock data from verification providers, structures it across countries and platforms, and makes the results explorable through maps, scatterplots and historical timelines.
Researchers can use the same infrastructure to follow how the market changes over time, compare platforms and countries, and study the effects of elections, regulation and platform policies.
From data to published research
Twelve months of COTSI data formed the basis of Mapping the online manipulation economy, published in Science in December 2025.
The research showed striking differences in the cost of creating fake accounts around the world and found evidence of increased demand for account verifications on Telegram and WhatsApp ahead of national elections.
COTSI and the research were subsequently covered by the Financial Times, Reuters, Euronews and the University of Cambridge.
Explore COTSI
Read the Science paper
