Influencer

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Influencer Fraud
The Influencer Marketing Manager’s Playbook

2018
 Contents

Influencer Fraud - an Influencer Marketing Manager’s Playbook 3

What is Influencer fraud? 4

A Google Search Brings up Many Places to Buy Followers 6

Disturbing Influencer Marketing Fraud Statistics 8

Evidence of Influencer Fraud 9

The Legal Status of Bot Accounts 12

What About Instagram Pods? 13

How do You Spot Influencer Fraud? 14

Platforms and Agencies Help You Spot Fake Influencers 18

Case Study: Unilever Reacts to Influencer Fraud 19

Know Your Influencers 20

Check the Metrics of Your Campaigns 21

The View of the Regulatory Authorities 22

Things May Be Improving 23

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Influencer Fraud - an Influencer Marketing

Manager’s Playbook

Influencer marketing has grown dramatically over the last few years and is now mainstream.
Brands of all sizes pay influencers to promote their products. Influencers range from the
most famous celebrities down to micro-influencers with no more than 5,000 followers.
However, there is a dark side to influencer marketing. Alas, along with all of the rewards
generated by influencer marketing there is also a murky world of influencer fraud.

It goes without saying that the most essential quality of being an influencer is to have
influence. Unfortunately, some people have discovered the potential of high influencer
incomes, without first “earning their stripes.” Some unscrupulous “influencers” have tried to
buy that status, rather than genuinely earn it.

It probably should not come as a surprise to people. With top celebrity influencers earning
$500,000 for a single post, and even ordinary micro-influencers earning $1,000 - $2,000 per
post, the more dishonest among us to have an incentive to make some quick, easy cash.
Unfortunately, it does not take long for an unsuspecting brand to discover that their
payments might be poor value for money.

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What is Influencer fraud?

Influencers are only valuable when they have followers. It takes time for any genuine
influencer to build a fan base. Some people are not prepared to devote the necessary time
and resources to developing their following; they try to give it an artificial helping hand.

Genuine accounts build slowly. Even influencers start as nobodies, perhaps with a small blog
or YouTube channel. Social media influencers usually make their name because of the
quality of the content they post. It takes time to become somebody online.

However, some people don’t want to put in the hard work to make their name. They look
for shortcuts to make the task easier. Fraudulent “influencers” try to dispense with the need
for organic growth.

These people ignore the fact that genuine influencers help their followers and provide
genuinely exciting or helpful content.

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Influencer fraud has been around as long as influencer marketing has, but most people
ignored it for some time. As The Fashion Law says,

Many brands' collective failure to put precise measurement systems in place to gauge the
specific return-on-investment for influencer marketing campaigns enabled many big-name
influencers to land wildly lucrative deals without having to show precisely how effective
their endorsements actually were.

One of the problems of influencer fraud is that it can send misleading messages. As Rand
Fishkin, founder and former CEO of Moz states,

You see a higher follower count, or a higher retweet count, and you assume this person is
important, or this tweet was well received. As a result, you might be more likely to amplify
it, to share it or to follow that person.

Faked followers boost numbers, at least in the short-term, and this can, in turn, attracted
genuine followers.

People often share items they believe to be popular. They usually don’t look behind the
numbers. If a “popular” post catches their eye, they are more likely to share it – even if it is
really only popular with computers, rather than humans.

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A Google Search Brings up Many Places to

Buy Followers

If you carry out a Google search, you will find many places offering to sell you followers.
These are often sites with unusual names, such as IDigic, Buzzoid, and Mrinsta. If you go to
these sites, you will find promises to sell you “Authentic and High-Quality Instagram
Followers.” For instance, iDigic offers you 100 Instagram followers for $2.965, 500 for $6.95,
1,000 for $9.95 and other quantities up to 50,000 followers for $249.95.

They stress the “importance” o buying Instagram followers to succeed online. For instance,
iDigic says,

If you want to grow your business along with the latest trends in the world, it is important to
spend your money on Instagram followers... Purchasing Instagram followers can provide
the boost that you need to take your business to the next level. It will highlight your
business as a popular entity and make it visible to the eyes of potential customers and
business partners.

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Further down the page, they claim,

The boost you get from these Buy Instagram Followers packages is nothing short of
phenomenal… And since we are very reliable, there is no need for you to panic when it
comes to being detected.

Last year, Hootsuite carried out an experiment to see whether a firm that buys followers
benefits from their transaction. It is perhaps no surprise that Hootsuite found that there is little
benefit to be gained from carrying out the practice.

They created a dummy account and bought 1,000 “quality” followers for $9.95. They used a
less than subtle Instagram username for this test - @[Link]. It turned out to be a
prophetic choice.

They had their 1,000 new followers by noon the next day – but unsurprisingly received no
engagement on their posts. On closer inspection, they found that their new followers were
“A bizarre mix of teenagers posting shirtless selfies, accounts with no posts at all, and more
than a few bots peddling webcam porn.”

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Disturbing Influencer Marketing Fraud Statistics

Last year, Digiday reported some disturbing influencer marketing fraud statistics released by
anti-fraud company Sway Ops.

Sway had surveyed a single day’s worth of Instagram posts that were tagged either
#sponsored or #ad. They discovered that more than 50 percent of the engagements on
these posts were fake.

The stats relating to comments were even worse. Of the 118,007 comments, only 20,942
were made by genuine Instagrammers – real people. The remaining 97,065 were made by
bots. AI-powered bots made an astounding 82 percent of the comments on these
sponsored posts.

Sway also discovered that 15 percent of influencers who took money and/or products to
make a post never made the post for which they were paid.

More recently, CampaignDeus analyzed almost 700,000 Instagram posts and identified
influencers who bought ‘bot’ followers. The Benchmarking and measurement firm found that
12% of UK influencers bought fake Instagram followers in the first six months of the year.
CampaignDeus published this in their first Influencer Index Report.

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Evidence of Influencer Fraud

As with most types of fraud, you come across different levels of influencer fraud. At one end,
you have a people who buy fake followers in the hope of making themselves look more
popular than they are. At the other extreme, you have people setting up deliberately false
social media accounts, carefully cultivating fake identities, with eh sole purpose of sharing
posts in return for payment. Often these posts are irrelevant to the account holder’s life, and
they often breach (or downright break) the rules of the various social networks.

The New York Times tells the tale of Jessica Rychly, a Minnesota teenager who found a fake
Twitter account in her name that hawks an incongruous range of products, such as
Canadian real estate investments, cryptocurrency and a radio station in Ghana, not to
mention several pornographic accounts, which the then 17-year-old Jessica could not
legally access. The alternative Jessica happily retweets in Arabic and Indonesian, despite
not understanding these languages.

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The common factor behind the accounts that “Jessica” promotes is that they were all clients
of Devumi. Devumi made most of its money by selling Twitter followers and retweets to
anybody wanting to grow their influencer status artificially. The New York Times has
calculated that Devumi collected millions of dollars, created 3.5 million automated Twitter
accounts, and provided 200 million Twitter “followers” to its clients.

This is not just a fake account with a name that just happens to be the same as the
Minnesota Jessica. The account uses her photo and profile details, and if you did not know
otherwise, it could be her’s. It is a purely counterfeit account, misusing Jessica’s details to
make it appear genuine.

Subtle changes were made to the “fake Jessica” account, presumably to avoid detection.
Although it used the same profile image as Jessica’s real profile, the picture was
color-shifted and recompressed. Also, the first letter of her account name was changed
from a lowercase “i” to a lowercase “l”.

In many ways, Jessica’s case is a clear example of identity fraud. Somebody has taken
Jessica’s online identity and used it for their own nefarious purposes. Yet, we are not talking
about a company situated in a distant part of the world, Devumi is an American company,
and it has benefited to the tune of millions of dollars thanks to social media fraud.

Jessica’s case is by no means unusual. Until recently, Twitter was full of fake accounts.
Research by the University of Southern California and Indiana University found that up to 48
million Twitter accounts – 15% of all Twitter accounts, were fake bot accounts.

In the most blatant cases, the accounts have no profile pictures and usernames that are just a
random jumble of letters and numbers.

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According to the New York Times report, Devumi had access to more than 3.5 million
automated accounts and sold them many times over. They used these accounts to give
their customers access to 200 million Twitter followers. About 55,000 of the accounts are
like Jessica’s – representing real people without their permission or even knowledge in
many cases. Some of these are minors.

It is notable that Devumi has now officially closed down, although it does redirect potential
customers to “Devaki’s Recommended Alternative Providers.” If you attempt to click through
to one of these sites, Malwarebytes blocks you going to the website.

The New York Times report may have focused on Twitter, but there are just as many cases
of influencer fraud on the other social networks. Facebook acknowledged in November
2017 that they had twice as many fake accounts as they had thought. At that stage, they felt
there could be up to 60 million fake Facebook accounts. With Instagram being the current
network of choice for influencer marketing, it also suffers from having many bot-operated
accounts and fake followers.

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The Legal Status of Bot Accounts

The reason why Devumi managed to operate its bot accounts falls into a legal gray zone.
While they clearly breach the social networks’ Terms of Service, they do not explicitly break
any laws.

You will find people offering to sell fake followers on virtually every social media platform. It
is often left to the social networks themselves to find and delete fake followers.

It is noticeable on Twitter that many of the accounts that sell followers pitch their services in
a graphical image, rather than text. They clearly see this as a way around Twitter’s AI as it
searches for bots.

Devaki’s founder, German Calas, denies that his company sells fake followers and says he
knew nothing about social identities stolen from real users. The New York Times
investigation does show, however, that Devumi offered Twitter followers, views on YouTube,
plays on SoundCloud, and endorsements on LinkedIn. They had many influencers and
celebrities as clients, including non-US politicians and government agencies.

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What About Instagram Pods?

Another issue faced by the businesses who pay for influencer marketing is the existence of
Instagram pods. Technically, Instagram pods are not fraud. Indeed bloggers have been
carrying out similar tactics for many years. However, you can easily question the ethics of
participating in an Instagram pod.

An Instagram pod is a group of about 30 Instagrammers who work together to enhance

the engagement on their posts. They engage with each other, liking and writing comments
on other pod members’ posts. There are also Twitter pods, and they probably exist on all
the leading social networks.

Some influencers consider pods to be a genuine way of supporting your fellow

Instagrammers. Others, however, find them shady. Clearly, engagement by pod members is
lesser-quality engagement than engagement by outsiders. A brand is unlikely to gain any
additional sales because of increased engagement by pod members.

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How do You Spot Influencer Fraud?

There are a variety of methods you can use to spot influencer fraud.

1 A Rapid Increase in Followers

Genuine accounts build up followers gradually over time. Sure, there may be some peaks
when an account gains greater exposure, but as a whole, you should be suspicious of rapid
increases in follower numbers.

You would expect a sudden increase in engagement if your content goes viral. An account
with sudden bursts in follower numbers, not matched by increased engagement, probably
purchased followers.

2 An Unbalance Ratio of Engagement to Followers

Although engagement rates drop the more followers an account has, there are relatively
standard bands within most accounts fall. Accounts with many fake followers don’t tend to
follow the usual patterns. As a rule of thumb, comments should be equivalent to about two
percent of your total engagement on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Sure, there will be
some accounts where comments make 5% or 1%, but few will fall outside this range.

According to the CampaignDeus Influencer Index Report, the engagement rate for branded
posts is lower than for organic posts, as you would expect. The average engagement rates
for the main sectors are:

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Fashion and Style – 3.8% branded, 4.1% organic

Travel – 3.7% branded, 4.3% organic

Parenting – 3.4% branded, 3.3% organic

Food and Drink – 3.3% branded, 3.7% organic

Beauty – 3.2% branded, 4.1% organic

Health – 3.2% branded, 3.5% organic

Home and garden – 3.2% branded, 3.2% organic

Fitness – 3.1% branded, 3.2 organic

In particular, you should be highly suspicious of any accounts with engagement rates of less
than one percent.

3 Irrelevant Comments

One of the easiest ways to spot the existence of fake followers is when you see comments
that are obviously irrelevant to the content of the post. Influencer fraudsters have tried to get
around this to some extent by using neutral comments, so you should be just as doubtful of
a “nice picture” comment as you would of a comment promoting Viagra on a picture of a
rose garden.

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4 Comments Are Always From the Same People

If an influencer belongs to an influencer pod, then you are likely to notice that he or she
consistently has relevant, but bland, comments from the same people. These people make
comments because it is a requirement of pod membership. However, there is rarely much
thought going into the comments, they are rarely little more than “contractual obligation”
comments.

5 An Unbalanced Demographic

According to the CampaignDeus Influencer Index Report, the key giveaway that an account
has purchased bot followers is the country of origin of most of their followers.
CampaignDeus found that UK accounts having a tiny proportion of their audience based in
the UK was a big red flag.

6 Most of an Instagrammer’s Photos Come from a Stock Library

Obviously, a bot does not have a person to help it take captivating images. Moreover, if
these accounts sit dormant, without posting images, there is a greater likelihood of
Instagram discovering the fake nature of the account. Therefore, these accounts often post
stock pictures from image libraries, in an effort to look genuine.

The way to discover this is to do an image check on a selection of images that an account
posts.

Of course, you cannot automatically assume that all accounts that post stock images are
bots. Bloggers who use stock images in their blog posts will most likely post these images
on Instagram to promote their posts.

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However, if there aren’t obvious blog posts referred to in the comments alongside the stock
images, the odds are that this is a fake account.

Of course, an image check may pick up cases of identify fraud, such as the case of Jessica
Rychly referred to above.

If you do an image search on a profile picture and find that it links to a stock image or an
account for a distinctly different person, you have a real red flag.

7 Unbalanced Video Views on YouTube

You would expect a sudden increase in engagement if your content goes viral. An account
with sudden bursts in follower numbers, not matched by increased engagement, probably
purchased followers.

Of course, people can buy video views as much as they can other types of engagement, so
for a YouTube channel look at the video views and relevance of comments.

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Platforms and Agencies Help You Spot

Fake Influencers

Those businesses try to build influencer engagement using organic methods have the
greatest danger of finding themselves victims of influencer fraud. Both influencer platforms
and agencies have some safeguards in place that makes life easier for their clients.

Platforms use two main systems to find the influencers they serve their clients. Either they
invite influencers to join their platform, or they use an AI-powered algorithm to find
influencers. You would hope that they would check the legitimacy of influencers who apply
to join their platform. The checks and balances may not be as robust on platforms that use
an algorithm to find influencers, but at least they provide plenty of statistics you can use to
estimate the legitimacy of an influencer.

Most of the platforms make an effort to gauge the quality of an influencer’s audience.
Influencer DB, for instance, gives each influencer a Quality Grade, both as a percentage and
as an A to F grade. This makes it clear when somebody is relying on fake or inactive
followers to boost their numbers.

Most agencies work with a hand-selected roster of preferred influencers. In this case, any
decent agency will use staff members to carry out ‘due diligence” on influencers before
they recommend them to their client brands. Agency staff often monitors influencer
accounts and follow up on any suspicious activity or metrics falling outside the expected
patterns.

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Case Study: Unilever Reacts to Influencer Fraud

One large company has decided to take a hard line on influencer fraud. Unilever, one of the
five largest consumer goods companies, has declared war on influencer fraud.

Unilever has stated it will not work with influencers who have bought fake followers.
According to Keith Weed, their Chief Marketing Officer,

At best it’s misleading, at worst it’s corrupt.

He also called on the social media networks to do more to eradicate the problem.

Some platforms already do things in this area, but they have to do it at a larger scale and
with more transparency, so the industry can be reassured that the influencers on their
platforms are not using these practices.

It would be foolish of influencers to ignore Unilever’s views. The company spent $9 billion
on adverts in 2017.

Unilever has traditionally used follower numbers to gauge an influencer’s popularity.

Therefore, it pays more to the influencers with the most followers. Yet this system of
comparative payments began to fall to pieces. They noticed that some of their so-called
more popular influencers were performing less well that some of the influencers with lower
followings (and therefore pay).

Unilever is not alone in having concerns. Samsung and Audi have also announced that they
intend to crack down on influencer fraud. If they discover you purchase fake followers, you
will never work with these high profile companies again.

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Know Your Influencers

Unilever has possibility learned about the effects of fake influencers from its competitors.
Proctor & Gamble Co is also a large consumer goods company, including Pampers and Olay
in their product range. Points North Group investigated and found that Pampers was the
brand using influencers with the fourth most fake followers in March 2018. Olay took 10th
spot on this list.

The brand that suffered the most from fake followers was Ritz-Carlton, which, according to
Points North Group, paid influencers with an incredible 78% of their followers being fake.

Launchmetrics reports that 46 percent of brands prefer working with micro-influencers

(those who have between 10,000 to 100,000 followers). Influencers of this size tend to be
more effective and generate higher rates of authentic engagement. Only 8 percent of
professionals in their survey claimed that the number of followers was the decisive factor in
choosing influencers. Forty-five percent of professionals said the quality of content was
their most important criteria.

It is noticeable that most of the brands identified by Points North as suffering at the hands of
fake influencers tended to work with macro and mega-influencers. As micro-influencers
have fewer followers, they have a greater ability to check the validity of people who follow
them, blocking any fake accounts they find.

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Check the Metrics of Your Campaigns

One disturbing factor about this is that quite a few brands accept influencer fraud as just a
cost of doing business. Some brands are willfully oblivious to whether the influencers they
work with have bought followers.

Also, a surprisingly large number of businesses do not take any notice of how their
campaigns perform. They never check their metrics, to see whether their influencer
marketing campaigns have succeeded or flopped.

This means, of course, that they never take opportunities to fix any problems with their
campaigns. They just use the same old influencers to promote the same old messages to
the same old (fake) followers.

Sometimes this is because brand managers only understand one social metric – follower
numbers. To them, success means working with influencers with the highest follower
numbers, regardless of any other factors. These social managers often run the company
social accounts the same way, focusing solely on boosting follower numbers and ignoring
engagement.

However, with the growth of influencer marketing over the last few years there has been
more of a movement to standardize influencer metrics. There is a push now for brands to
set clear goals for their campaigns and then to focus on the statistics that explicitly measure
the success at meeting those goals.

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The View of the Regulatory Authorities

Regulatory bodies in a number of countries are now taking a closer look at influencers who
do not play the game fairly. The FTC in the USA made its views very clear in 2017, and the
National Advertising Division (“NAD”) has continued to monitor poorly disclosed influencer
marketing. Although these organizations’ focus is on influencer disclosure, they clearly want
transparency in influencer marketing. Influencer fraud threatens to disrupt that openness.
Across the Atlantic, Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is investigating
whether influencers are transparent enough with their sponsored and promoted posts. This
followed up from Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) previously raising concerns
about promotions lacking transparency.

R V
P

O R
TE E
CT AND S

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Things May Be Improving

It should be no surprise that Twitter has devoted considerable resources this year to tidying
up this problem. Twitter has systematically removed tens of millions of suspicious and fake
accounts. They axed 70 million accounts in May and June and continued their purging in
July.

Collectively, users lost tens of millions of followers, but as they were fake, their loss can
hardly be a concern. Pundits have suggested that the purge has reduced the total Twitter
following by 6 percent.

Washington Post’s Elizabeth Dwoskin reported that President Donald Trump’s following
count fell by 100,000 and Barack Obama’s by 400,000. Clearly, presidents have insufficient
time to check the validity of people who follow them, and as a result, they suffer from
having many fake followers. Not that Donald Trump was impressed by losing followers. His
response to this news was to tweet,

Twitter is getting rid of fake accounts at a record pace. Will that include the Failing New
York Times and propaganda machine for Amazon, the Washington Post, who constantly
quote anonymous sources that, in my opinion, don’t exist - They will both be out of
business in 7 years!

[Link]
wcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1015586529484443648&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fsiteproxy.ruqli.workers.dev%3A443%2Fhttps%2Fwww.
[Link]%2F2018%2F7%2F11%2F17561610%2Ftrump-fake-twitter-followers-bot-accounts

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Of course, the purge would have had a hug impact on those who had bought followers,
with most if not all of their “investment” vanishing. Was this the modern day equivalent to
investing in fool’s gold?

If you go to some of the sites that specialized in selling fake followers, you will notice some
have disappeared. One such site was [Link] – but that domain is now for sale.
Similarly, Social Envy now simply displays on its home page:

FRIENDLY NOTE - We are no longer accepting customers for attracting Real Followers & we
no longer associate with Instagram™.

Both Facebook and Instagram have toughened access to their APIs this year, and this
perhaps has made some of the businesses that dealt in selling followers no longer tenable.

If that is the case, then there is hope for the industry yet.

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