Under the Influence- How to Fake Your Way Into Getting Rich on Instagram

by Trey Ratcliff

  The amazing thing about Tane is he actually travels with a steamer trunk full of sparkly pillows that he seductively arranges around his manboy body whenever he assumes a semi supine sprawl.

  Look at Tane fondling that mango. Those sweet, soft, boyish fingers know no bounds.

  Step 2: Go to the Instagram “Black Market” and Buy Some Followers

  The next thing we needed to do was buy some followers for his account. There are countless options on the web and via apps to buy followers. Below I’ve listed just five I found.

  This is from igreviews.com and it only represents a mere fraction of the thousands of websites where you can buy followers, likes, and comments.25

  What’s surprising is when you want to buy followers from any of these providers, you’re not always required to provide Instagram login details for the account you want to fill. That’s right, you can, right now, go buy followers for any Instagram user you choose. It doesn’t have to be your own account.

  This is one of the services called Tweetangels.com. These services are getting smarter in that you don’t buy 10,000 followers all at once, for example. They trickle them in over a month, so it looks less suspicious. Many of the more astute fake Influencers now prefer to use this technique as it makes their historical growth appear more organic.

  By paying third party services, we were able to amass over 100,000 followers for our fake Influencer, @genttravel, in only 30 days.

  Meanwhile, the control account, @genttravelnz, had difficulty getting over 100 followers in the same 30 days. I even mentioned it several times from my own personal account, @treyratcliff, to try and help it catch up. Being attractive, featuring exotic settings, and even getting a genuine shout out from a big account can all help build a following organically, but it’s not enough these days and it wasn’t enough for @genttravelnz.

  Get Free Refills

  The Instagram black market is getting competitive enough that many follower-buying companies offer a customer service guarantee. They promise to “refill your wine glass” if you don’t get the full delivery of the 10,000 drops you ordered. If you look closer at the data, you’ll often see these refills come in later days.

  Instagram knows full well there are automated scripts and services that perform these actions en masse. Emily Cain, from Instagram’s communication team, shared her thoughts with me over email. She said, “This type of service requires no technical skill, and while almost all services claim to operate within our terms of service, they most certainly do not, as they turn to automation to perform all actions.”

  Here is an email we received from another company after we bought 15,000 followers for our test account, for just a few pennies. Notice they mention how you will lose followers, but they will backfill them for you. Bloody nice blokes there!

  Buy Legitimate Advertisements to Attract Followers

  It bears mentioning that there’s actually already a system in place for you to legitimately get more eyeballs and interaction on your photos, that also grows your followers: Instagram advertising! I mean, this may be very obvious, but it is worth pointing out. Anyone can pay Instagram itself to make sure a particular photo gets shown to more users. Instagram lets you get quite specific about which people you’d like to see it. Also, far fewer of these users are bots.

  All of these other sketchy systems out there are undercutting Instagram’s own advertising system by skirting around it. This seems to be another good reason for Instagram to go after these third parties since there are millions of dollars going to these unscrupulous sites that might otherwise be spent directly with Instagram.

  Use the Follow/ Unfollow Method of Gaining Followers

  Say you see a notification that a brand, such as @amazingthailand, or a stranger who you don’t know, just started following you. If you’ve ever paid any attention to your Instagram notifications and wondered why certain people or companies might want to start following you out of the blue, let me burst your bubble yet again. Yes, they could have found you organically because you happened to have posted a particularly eye-catching photo of a tree in your garden in Brooklyn. It’s possible they had a look at your other photos and decided they had to follow you. However, neither of these scenarios is that likely (not to say that your garden snaps aren’t great).

  They’re probably following you in hopes you’ll automatically return the favor and follow them back. Then, they’ll unfollow you and repeat the process with another unsuspecting Instagram user.

  This is a popular method to gain followers. Following users en masse can be done manually and not cost anything besides your time. However, it’s much easier to go through an automated service on a large scale for a very inexpensive price.

  How does it work? Basically, an automated service follows about 7,500 random people. These may be potters in Bangladesh, tire companies in Portland, a farmer in Uruguay, fake bots, or maybe you. Some of those people, a very small percentage, will see a notification that they have a new follower and they’ll follow back out of politeness. Some of these accounts, which are also run by bots, will see the new follow and will also follow back. Days later, the original account unfollows you and the thousands of others they started following. Some of those people will unfollow them too, but some will stick around because they don’t know it’s a ploy. So, net-net, the original account has more followers than they did at the beginning of this exercise.

  It’s a numbers game. Over time, these accounts will slowly accumulate followers. It should be noted that this activity is against Instagram’s Terms & Conditions, but it still goes on all the time.

  Step 3: Buy Some Likes

  We’ve talked a lot about followers. What’s the next step?

  The other metric on Instagram that gets a lot of attention is known as engagement, which is counted in likes and comments. It’s measuring how engaged your follower base is.

  Marketing companies are especially interested in engagement because high engagement indicates how readily your followers can be influenced to take an action. Action-oriented followers might, down the line, turn into buyers for these brands.

  There are countless places to buy likes, including this one—BuzzDayz. You can put all your likes all on one photo or spread them across a selection. Delivery is usually within a few minutes.

  Buying likes is extremely simple and commonplace because it’s an effective way for fake Influencers to impress both agencies and brands.

  We found at least two dozen services for buying likes. We tried five of them to build up our @genttravel fake Influencer account. They all worked perfectly. We were shocked when the first one we tried delivered the 10,000 likes we ordered, across 16 photos, all in less than 10 minutes. It’s obvious these likes have to be automated—there’s no way humans could do this so quickly.

  You have a lot of options when buying likes. You can dump them all on a single photo or spread them out over a group of photos. Currently, there is no way to look at a historical graph of likes (as there is for followers, which you will see in the next chapter). If you could see a historical graph of likes, the mathematical anomalies over time would be obvious, as a few posts would show much higher engagement than others.

  Because there’s no way of checking “like” trends over time, brands and agencies have a difficult time testing the veracity of likes. A typical post that a brand might pay for could garner as many as 20,000 likes or more. In the Instagram app, you can look at who liked a post and even click to view their account, to check if they’re a real human. However, taking these steps 20,000 times to verify that these people are real would take ages and would result in some serious Repetitive Strain Injury. With “like” numbers frequently reaching into the millions across a campaign, no one is going to check the legitimacy of each and every like.

  But if you did, it’s easy to see when they’ve been purchased. We did a bit of clicking after we bought ours for the test and the bot accounts that liked our photo were pretty laugh
able.

  How funny is this? This bot that auto-liked our photo was named “Auto Like.”

  Step 4: Buy Some Comments

  As far as this type of interaction goes, you can buy random comments or custom comments. Random comments are completely silly, from vague platitudes such as “Great Pic!” to a bunch of random emojis. They’re also not expensive to buy.

  I did somehow talk Tane into getting in the ocean to recreate this silly classic Influencer pose, but the rest is fake, including the followers who liked it and the brilliantly crafted custom comments. We created 1,000 different comments in a spreadsheet and delivered them to a service, which in turn posted them to our Instagram posts within ten minutes. Sidenote: This would actually be a fun trick to play on your friends.

  This service only offers two sorts of comments: random or custom. There are other sites that offer much cheaper comments, but they are usually poor quality.

  In our first tests, we went to well-known websites for buying followers, likes, and comments for our fake Influencer account. Since those worked smoothly, we got bolder and ventured out to some edgier and less legitimate sites. They were precisely the kind of websites you wouldn’t go near with your own credit card, so I borrowed the credit card of our operations guy, Curtis. (If you’re reading this, Curtis, you’ll probably need to torch that card pretty soon.)

  A couple receipts from when we purchased random and custom comments for our experimental fake Influencer account follow.

  Of course, random pre-written comments can be vague enough to be applicable in many situations, but often don’t make any sense in the context of the actual post. Scammers who buy these generic comments may save a bit of time generating custom comments and then have to spend time weeding out the duds afterward.

  If you dive into the comments to click on the ones that look suspicious, you’ll end up looking at a barely concealed bot. Someone hasn’t made more than a handful of posts, yet was moved by your photo enough to comment? Seems suspicious.

  That said, even when the commenting account looks like it is owned by a normal person, the comment itself may still be driven by a bot. We’ll talk about how that’s possible in later chapters.

  One thing we did not bother to buy was comments that consist of only random emojis, the Instagram patois of the illiterate. These are the cheapest comments of all, which is why you see them on so many accounts.

  In one order, we requested 2,000 random comments to be delivered across 10 different photos on our fake Influencer account, including the following five posts. Now that you know what’s going on, can you spot how ridiculous the comments are?

  Note: I’m going to make a bunch of captions for these photos of Tane, one of my favorite assistants. Now that we’re familiar with spotting fake comments, I want you to know that all of the captions that follow are (probably) fake as well.

  Hey, Tane—in that Stay Puft Marshmallow Man outfit in Tokyo on Halloween, remember that time you found those guys doing pot near Shinjuku? Yeah, that was awesome. Actually, this is the only caption that is true.

  Hi Tane! Remember that time at Burning Man that you woke up in the morning only wearing your blue jeans, by the trash fence with another couple? Actually, this caption is true too.

  Hey Tane, remember that time in Tokyo where Curtis found you curled up in the curtains of his room at the Ritz-Carlton? You were wearing only a pajama top (with the buttons misaligned) and holding the remote control for the robot toilet? This one is actually true also.

  Hey Tane, remember that time in Lisbon when you found that drug dealer named Carlos and he followed you around for days asking if you wanted to buy drugs? This story is also true.

  We didn’t want to let the bots have all the fun, so, as part of this experiment, we came up with 1,000 of our own custom comments for our fake Influencer account @genttravel. Check Appendix B of this book to see them all.

  And, big surprise ... it worked flawlessly. For the comments we generated ourselves, we bought 5,000 more comments for $30. Some of the gems we came up with were repeated five times. We could have created 5,000 different comments or bought five separate packages of 1,000 comments. You can do whatever you want with these tools, really.

  Here are some of the comments we came up with. I was obviously having a bit too much fun with Tane, because he’s such a good sport. See all of the comments we came up with in Appendix B if you need some fun bedtime reading.

  Hey Tane, remember that time we roofied you in my studio and the team drew all over your flawless body with Sharpie markers? No, of course you don’t.

  Tane used his tongue to carve out that hole in the bottom of this can and then subsequently used that same tongue as a proboscis to suck out and swallow the can’s mysterious innards.

  One can see how a savvy social media scammer might create a bunch of custom comments that speak specifically to a particular brand or product. Hopefully, they would do a much more effective job than me, with my obviously ludicrous comments. Influencers know what their clients want to hear. With custom comments, they can make sure the bots deliver those talking points perfectly.

  The brand managers, visiting the post, often never suspect a thing. Even if they did, and had the time and inclination to analyze thousands of comments individually, they would have great difficulty figuring out if the comments were real or not. It would still be almost impossible to prove.

  All of those followers, likes, and comments we had purchased for Tane came from bots, not real people. But no one seemed to notice. The account of @genttravel soon started receiving queries from several “Instagram Influencer” agencies who wanted to represent him to make deals with Fortune 500 brands.

  Step 5: Buy Instagram Story Views

  Many regular Instagram users are familiar with Instagram Stories. These are short 15-second videos or photos that appear at the top of your feed. They only last 24 hours before they disappear, but these are also commonly used tools for Influencers, who can promise their brands to do X number of stories in exchange for some number of dollars.

  There are many places on the web to buy story views and they are quite inexpensive, as you can see. These above options are all delivered within 1 hour. Of course, these views are all coming from automated bots, because the company doesn’t have 10,000 people sitting in a big room telling everyone which stories to view.

  It should go without saying that if you can buy one type of number to fake influence, you can buy almost any kind of number.

  There is another feature on Instagram, called Instagram TV, where people can upload much longer videos. Those videos can be more interactive, allowing people to comment and like while the video is playing. Many websites allow you to buy IGTV views, impressions, comments, and likes.

  Step 6: Buy The Verified Blue Tick

  Counterfeit social media accounts have been around since the beginning. Many users started creating accounts to impersonate famous people. Instagram and other social media platforms needed a way to indicate which accounts were the real deal, so they created the blue tick. A group within Instagram now bestows that blue tick on verified profiles to indicate those accounts are a real person, of some importance. These ticks are generally reserved for celebrities or for someone who achieved a certain amount of success in one area or another.

  Since the verified blue tick lends legitimacy and credibility, it can also be used to trick brands and agencies into thinking the blue tick account is influential. At this stage, you won’t be surprised to learn there are now several companies online which claim to be able to supply a coveted blue tick outside of official channels. I did not attempt to do this for the fake Influencer account we built for @genttravel, but I found many services online that claim to be able to make this happen.

  You can see I have earned the “blue tick” that indicates I have been verified. However, sometimes people get this tick through clandestine maneuvers.

  Many of these blue tick offers are actually phishing s
cams, where the perpetrator attempts to steal Instagram details from desperate wannabe Influencers. An email my friend @linneaberzen received from a company offering to get her a blue tick for her Instagram account follows. I’m not saying this particular offer is an attempt at phishing, but it might be.

  Here’s an example of a phishing email, trying to either get information or money from the target, while they claim to be able to get you a blue verified account tick.

  Many people are probably fooled by this scheme. But look at the official email address they’ve supplied—Instagraamhelp2018@gmail.com. Hopefully common sense will prevail.

  Step 7: Explore Everything Else

  So, now you’ve created your account, generated some content, attracted some fake followers, drummed up some fake engagement, and maybe even verified that you’re a legitimate actor. What else can you do?