How to Spot an Instagram Account That's Been Buying Followers (With Examples)

How to Spot an Instagram Account That's Been Buying Followers (With Examples)

In today’s social media, followers have become currency with the most popular Instagrammers wielding a lot of power. It’s no surprise that many unscrupulous users have been tempted into buying their prominence rather than earning it. Fortunately, there are now quick and easy ways to spot those who are trying to cheat their way to social media success.

A few months ago, Trey Ratcliff released his book detailing how easy it is to purchase influence, hopefully prompting more brands to run a few checks before investing in social media accounts whose standing might not be what they seem. With the rise of bots and bought followers, knowing whose popularity on Instagram is real is becoming increasingly difficult and tools for checking on who is cheating are now incredibly important. Instagram is an infamously murky platform and when you consider that, according to a recent documentary, even Hollywood superstars appear to be buying followers, having an insight into the numbers can be highly useful. (If you want to skip the meat of how all of this works and find out how to check on someone for free, scroll down.)

Checking an Account: The Expensive Option

Services such as HypeAuditor do an excellent job, running detailed analytics on accounts, digging into their follower/following statistical history, and giving info not only on whether there’s been some sneaky buying, but insights into the geographic location, age and gender of a profile’s followers — and crucially, whether those fans engage with that person’s content. HypeAuditor gives an account an overall rating — an Audience Quality Score — which reflects the quality of the account’s followers, engagement (both from followers and from the account itself), and the authenticity of that account.

Screenshot from HypeAuditor.com

HypeAuditor kindly gave me some credit and I ran a few tests. Example One advertises his services in Los Angeles. A quick check with HypeAuditor suggests the possibility of some foul play. I reached out to ask if Example One had bought followers but I was blocked and received no response.

The profile gets an Audience Quality Score of just 35% which is HypeAuditor’s basic metric for giving an overview of the desirability of an account from a marketer’s point of view. This figure doesn’t necessarily give a clear idea of whether someone is cheating because of the various factors that it considers. If you have a lot of followers but don’t comment on other accounts or reply to those commenting on your posts, this will drag your score down significantly — @OfficialFstoppers scores a paltry 40% with the explanation: “Very low activity, no suspicious likes or comments. Low number of comments.” Fstoppers has not been buying followers but because it’s not a single person behaving like a human being, it doesn’t engage like a human being, added to which is that fact that its followers don’t necessarily have a huge amount to say. The HypeAuditor rating reflects this.

By contrast, user @UpThatRock receives an Audience Quality Score of 86% (“Highly engaged audience of real people”) which reflects organic growth, regular content, consistent engagement, and very natural activity, both from the account holder and users. She may only have 16,000 followers, but this user could be an incredibly effective means of marketing niche products to a niche audience (full disclosure: she’s also my wife).

A fairly typical post by Instagram user @upthatrock. Her photographer, @kiellgram, is amazing.

To understand why Example One probably bought followers while Fstoppers has not, you have to dig into HypeAuditor’s data a little further. The report includes a graph that gives an overview of the user’s followers and this can be a bit of a giveaway:

HypeAuditor's graph allows you to hover your mouse and find specific data. On June 4, 2017, the account had 13,682 followers. Six days later, it had 33,319.

Of course, this user’s huge spike in followers could be attributed to being featured by a huge account or receiving some other type of intense publicity. The slow drop-off in followers can be a sign that Instagram is gradually killing off the dodgy accounts that made up the 30,000 people that suddenly thought that this photographer’s work is amazing.

Take a look at Example Two, an “internationally published fashion and wedding photographer” based in Florida and “sponsored by Polaroid.” Alarm bells would ring for many when viewing his profile because his posts typically receive fewer than 100 likes despite him having more than 26,000 followers. HypeAuditor gives him an overall score of 29% but again it’s the follower graph that is most revealing:

Example Three gained around a thousand followers overnight on at least seven occasions in 2017 and 2018, and saw an increase of more than 5,000 followers between February 6 and February 10 this year. You can draw your own conclusions.

Follow/Unfollow Automation

It’s also worth having a glance at how many people that account is following as this can also reveal some unusual patterns. Consider Example Three, an account belonging to a photographer and retoucher who has 133,000 followers. Again, there are warning signs as post likes rarely break into three figures. As you’d expect, the graph shows some unusual activity:

The peaks and troughs of the followers graph are slightly odd, but there are signs from the following graph that demonstrate some mass follow/unfollow activity. Some automated systems try to gain followers by following other accounts for a short period of time and then unfollowing again in the hope that an unsuspecting user might follow back. HypeAuditor’s graphs can give some indication of whether this has been taking place.

HypeAuditor includes a ton of other information, such as making a judgment as to whether a user has engaged in comment pods. However, its services cost money and I certainly can’t justify spending $30 on trying to find out whether one user is playing dirty.

SocialBlade offers free reports and incorporates some graphs (click on "Historical Data" once you've done a report), though it doesn’t present the information with the same depth or clarity. You also have to figure out what each service is valuing in its assessment. HypeAuditor gave @OfficialFstoppers 40% but SocialBlade gives it a “total grade” of B. By contrast, @UpThatRock recorded 86% with HypeAuditor but gets only C- from SocialBlade, despite her picking up an average of 900 followers a month. Given that my own relatively useless Instagram (I post regularly from time to time but hardly use the app) gets a D, @UpThatRock’s grade seems inexplicably brutal.

No Answers, Just Strong Indications

What I quickly learned is that no service can definitively say whether someone has bought followers. Instead, the data they deliver can be is pretty damning and different services present it in different ways. If you’re a business that needs to regularly check the integrity of a number of users, a service like HypeAuditor is worth the money. As a curious individual, however, it’s quite expensive and free alternatives, such as Social Blade, exist. Of all the tools, my personal favorite — and it’s free — is IGAudit.io, a service which attacks the data using a unique method.

Free and Unique

IGaudit takes a different approach to assessing an account’s follwership. Rather than sifting through follow/unfollow/following data and suggesting conclusions from various patterns, IGaudit looks at 200 random followers and determines whether they each offer any value as an account. It then takes an average from those 200 profiles and delivers a score out of 100. Similar to HypeAuditor’s “Audience Quality Score,” this metric gives you an indication of how good an account is at reaching people. If the score is particularly low, it’s a sure sign that something sketchy has been going on.

Results of reports from IGAudit. These scores seem to tie in with HypeAuditor’s assessment. And if you’re curious, @upthatrock scored 83.2%.

I reached out to IGAudit’s creator, Andrew Hoque, who told of how he wanted a tool that’s easy to access (there’s no sign-up required) and free. Again, this is not a definitive method for determining if someone is cheating. As he explains, when it comes to companies looking to partner with an Instagram account, “if a user comes back with below 50%, generally we don’t recommend working with them as this is a reflection of their audience’s realness and reachability.”

In Summary

Instagram is murky and the number of people cheating their stats is depressing — according to this documentary, even Hollywood superstars are buying followers. However, there are tools to give you an insight into people who are being dishonest. Paid services like HypeAuditor give you detailed data and are great for agencies who want to extensively vet an influencer before working with them. Free services — IGAudit in particular — are really useful for when curiosity gets the better of you and you want to see if someone has given in to temptation and tried to game the system.

The Depressing Final Thought

Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any consequences for buying followers, and Instagram is either overwhelmed with fake content and can't cope with it or — and this seems more likely — it doesn't care. The example accounts mentioned in this article won't suffer from other photographers or nerds like me rumbling their apparent duplicity; more likely, a naive client will glance at the account and be impressed by the numbers. For example, most couples choosing a wedding photographer won't make their selection according to the number of Instagram followers, but having a big following certainly counts in your favor. When trimming a choice of six photographers down to three, a couple might be swayed by the photographer with 10,000 followers over the one with a couple of hundred, and I doubt they'll start digging to see if any of those followers are real or not.

In short, if you've just learned how to spot cheats, you may also have just learned that you might as well follow suit and invest in some fakery.

With that depressing thought, if you have experience of buying followers or have any information on how to spot cheats, please leave a comment below.

Andy Day's picture

Andy Day is a British photographer and writer living in France. He began photographing parkour in 2003 and has been doing weird things in the city and elsewhere ever since. He's addicted to climbing and owns a fairly useless dog. He has an MA in Sociology & Photography which often makes him ponder what all of this really means.

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22 Comments

So, I have to work with influencers for my day job and the biggest thing I look for is authentic interaction between the "brand" and "followers". I'd much rather work with a micro influencer with an incredibly devoted and loyal fan base than a mega influencer or something with 20-30K followers that doesn't have that authentic community engagement.

These tools are definitely great, but I think nothing can beat a little qualitative sleuthing over a period of time.

Exactly this.

Wait you mean those accounts with 30k, that have 4k comments that say vague things like, "Keep it up," or "Oh I love this," or the ever amazing, "Great shot," on a post that's a video, aren't real? I legit wonder who these people are fooling. It has to be someone right? That stuff isnt the cheapest based on that documentary that followed this whole fake follower thing.

Many (like a ton) of people are not educated to notice that those accounts have a fake followers base. Otherwise people would simply not buy followers.

No, I mean accounts that have authentic engagement and meaningful conversation.

Instagram simply does not care. Also, FB is a company that needs to show its investors how popular they are, and that there are a gazillion people using its services, so that they keep making money. The 30% of fake/spam accounts on Instagram (my own estimate based on the sampling from my previously 10k followers account for which I never, ever cheated) is only helping FB make more money, keep the investors happy. IG/FB don't care about the few frustrated users like we are.

Btw, spam against my account became such out of control that I closed the account, changed its name, and re-opened a new account with the original name (like someone described a few weeks ago on this site). I have now 180 followers, 100% real haha, and I just block any new follower that looks fake. Having said that, a commercial client has already showed me signs that they preferred my account with nearly 10k followers (from which I had deleted 4k fakes manually...)

Instagram has much more information at its disposal than any of these services (eg IP addresses, digital fingerprint analysis). Instagram can know, very accurately, which accounts are fake.

It chooses to ignore fake accounts most of the time because the fake accounts boost its numbers, which therefore boost its reports to investors. Instagram and the fakers have, at least, a sybiotic relationship.

The odd "big purge" of fake accounts by Instagram is simply a feel good marketing tool to boost investor confidence, but if Instagram was serious about fake accounts then there would never be a need to have a big purge.

This can also go in the big pile of "things I don't care about" either.

I am completely unconvinced of the value of "influencer marketing" on Instagram. It appears to be the latest social media fad backed with absolutely no ROI calculations whatsoever.

This leaves everyone muttering vaguely about the benefits of exposure... a line I seem to have heard somewhere before. Hard pass and thus, no need to determine who's buying likes and follows.

While the hype might be a little overblown, you cannot argue with the copious amounts of research that show proper influencer collaborations can be extremely effective.

Is using a celebrity as a spokesperson all hype? Research shows celebrities have a certain trust factor with consumers. Recent research also shows that social influencers are seen as credible and authentic (generalization) by followers.

Influencer marketing has been around for quite some time, it just now has a name for it and it happens on a phone app

You don’t really need a website to figure this out. If someone has 17k followers but get fewer likes than me (70-100), they don’t have genuine followers.
That being said, I’m addicted to analytics, so I’ll be checking this site out, out of curiosity.

If people buy followers, they can also buy likes. This way they fool everyone.

I feel like a lot of them forget that part.

Example one is how my account looks and I have never once bought followers. I have, however been featured on Instagram's suggested user list (twice) which turns out comes with the same negative effects of purchasing followers.

i've had the exact same experience! I think ex-suggested accounts are "cursed" with attracting all the spam, and never being able to see positive growth. that's why i retired that account and started fresh.

Did you keep the same username? If so, how? I'm considering doing the same but my username is vital to my business.

Yes, I had both accounts open and switched the usernames almost simultaneously

Pay to spot fake followers? I thought paying to get followers was lame enough but this! Everyone on Instagram is fake in some sense.

This entire "buy followers" is not only a thing for those who like to cheat the system (or turn fake into fortune), it can also easily be "done to others". In my case, someone thought it would be funny to buy me followers. It was meant to be a joke, I believe, or "help", who knows, but stuff like that (so easily done) can backfire. Truth is, even though I influence people during presentations and workshops, I am certainly not an "influencer" by the definition of IG.

Long story short, interaction has gone down, the IG algorithm does not favour fake followers and bots, and I've decided to close down my account of 18k followers and start fresh, from zero, with a hand full of new but real followers, 3 photos in my stream so far. No regrets, it's actually a very nice feeling to start from scratch again. @bollinger.photo

Remember those days of paying popular (celebrities) to attend an event, party or club? Remember those interviewed (while being paid) for magazines? Remember the PR release that caused journalists to write about a celebrity or business? How about those TV spokespeople who were paid to promote anything. So enough of hating about IG and who it is used, it is a tool, a PR and advertising tool and popular people have always been in demand for that. IG has a financial interest to make sure engagement is real but also has a stock price affected by user figures. Until they make the decision, like Twitter, that was forced by political realities, to remove those accounts we must deal with IG as it is. What is the complaint, that the free service has fake people?

Getting Instagram Followers is important, although its not important to gamble your account. Due to this fact its typically recommended to buy Instagram followers from professional Social Media Company. Supposing that you ask me then i would undoubtedly advise you try ZvMarket to Buy Instagram followers. ZvMarket is SEO and SMM company which over 5 years in existence. Dependable dealers on ZvMarket renders it most ideal to buy services. Its not massive like Fiverr or upwork yet its decent. These individuals are also widely known because you will never find social media services in all of the marketplace website including Fiverr.

If somebody is buying Instagram followers then he can buy likes too, but overall a very good article.https://pvapoint.com/buy-gmail-accounts/

Great insights on detecting Instagram cheaters! Andy's exploration of tools like HypeAuditor and the free IGAudit makes it easier to unveil the authenticity of influencers. Spot on!