San Francisco, Jun 18 (IANS): In an international crackdown on bots, Facebook on Thursday filed separate lawsuits in Europe and the US over unauthorised use of automation software on Facebook and Instagram.

Facebook Inc. and Facebook Ireland sued MGP25 Cyberint Services and its founder in the commercial court of Madrid in Spain for providing automation software to distribute fake likes and comments on Instagram.

The defendant's service was designed to evade Instagram's restrictions against fake engagement by mimicking the official Instagram app in the way that it connected to its systems.

Facebook alleged that the defendants did this for profit, and continued to do so even after it sent a Cease and Desist letter and disabled their accounts.

Facebook Inc. also sued Mohammad Zaghar in federal court in San Francisco for allegedly operating a data scraping service called Massroot8.

This service asked people to provide their Facebook login credentials on the Massroot8 website.

The credentials were then used by Zaghar's service to scrape user data from Facebook.

Facebook said that Zaghar collected the data by using a computer programme to control a network of bots, which pretended to be an Android device connected to the official Facebook mobile app.