I have never personally paid to take one of these courses, because I’m already, like, totally to the max, a super expert.
While some of these courses are legitimate, some of these courses are absolute scams, designed to swindle both you and your friends out of money.
There was a recent article by an Instagrammer on Medium who claimed she was roped into one of these Influencer classes. The class was run by celebrity Influencer Aggie Lal (@travel_inhershoes). The swindled author described the class, saying that, while Lal claimed to have earned their Influencer status legitimately, some of the numbers just didn’t add up. “I watched [Lal] hit the benchmarks of followers: 200k, 400k, 500k. Hell, I even witnessed her hit 890k and then weirdly drop to 840k in ten minutes…”29
The author continued, “I have been playing at this Instagram game for a while. I know the tricks, I know the deep dark secrets. I’ve done the pods, I’ve played the Follow/Unfollow game, and I know all about the growth methods most of these 500k+ follower girls do. I also know that this particular Instagram Star did a lot of those same techniques. I saw her name on the lists of Secret Giveaways. I saw her in the same pod circles as many of my friends, I knew she was doing the same things we all were. But was she going to be honest about it?”30
According to the article, this course was, in fact, a scam. The main point of the course was to get as many of your friends as possible to sign up for the course. It was a thinly-veiled pyramid scheme. But hey, as P.T. Barnum said, “there’s an Influencer born every minute.”
Another article about the scam explained how @travel_inhershoes promised to illustrate how she went from “being a broke traveler to becoming a six figure earning travel blogger.” She told Buzzfeed news that she earned $188,860 from the course. Upon learning this, most students felt swindled. One student said, “[The] videos were barely five minutes long, she was never involved with the students, and made a lot of comments that turned people off such as ‘when posing for pictures try not to look pregnant’ or ‘people who work at Starbucks aren’t living up to their potential’. The content was basic information you would find from any simple Google search. Not $500 worth.”31
Since the purported scam of trying to “teach” other people how to be a proper Influencer has been exposed, she hasn’t been getting the nicest comments.
@travel_inhershoes has a YouTube video titled, in all-caps, “I GET PAID TO TRAVEL THE WORLD - HOW I BECAME A TRAVEL BLOGGER part 1,” where she attempts to explain her follower growth. In the video, she asks a question of herself, “How did you get your numbers?” She rambles a bit and tries to explain that you have to be serious and obliquely utters, “I posted over 1,000 photos, like, easy.”
She is happy to say that most travel bloggers are not that glamorous and still live with their parents, even into their 30’s. Of course, she makes it abundantly clear that she does not live with her parents.
She goes on to give vague advice about how to be an Instagram Travel Influencer. “With hotels, it’s very different,” she bloviates. “They are ready to fly me over with a plus one. They cover everything from flights to transport to food to activities—everything included in exchange for photos—and they give you a fee on top of that.” She claims to reject 90% of offers she receives.
In the video, she also vapidly says, “You really need to be as true to yourself as possible.”
A Recommended Instagram Influencer Course: “How to Build Real Influence”
I will make a serious online course recommendation for those of you interested in becoming a real Influencer (instead of using all the underhanded tricks listed in this book). Obviously, there are many legitimate, financially successful Influencers. This book certainly describes many of the ways you can become a respected Influencer. However, if you want a deeper dive, there is a multi-week online course that will show you all the ropes. The course was created by a trusted friend, Lauren Bath (@laurenepbath), who also does wildly successful in-person workshops for Influencers.
If you’re interested, you can sign up for the course at https://TheTravelBootCamp.com/HowToBuildRealInfluence. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, I consulted and contributed to the course. Lauren also said that she will buy me unlimited wine in addition to paying me for contributing, so I have a vested interest.
Pretend You Are Already Sponsored
In the wild, wild west of Instagram, there is another, but not often used, way to “fake” your way into getting popular. Here’s how it works. Some wannabe Influencers will post photos that appear to be sponsored by a brand, like, say, a Fendi or BMW. They tag the brand and make it look like they’ve been sponsored. They do this to try to establish some kind of sponsorship track record, so real brands will want to work with them in the future. It’s like a visual résumé filled with fake jobs.
This tactic doesn’t always work. According to an article in The Atlantic, one marketing manager named Jason Wong said he was recently duped. After Wong hired one Influencer to promote his product, Wong later found out that all of that Influencer’s prior brand deals were fake. Based on this experience, Wong now does his due diligence on potential partners before working with them. He cross-references all Influencers, calling up other brands they’ve claimed to work with to see if the work was paid.32
Step 8: Understand Your New Fake Audience (They Can’t ALL Be Bots!)
Many of the sites we’ve discussed often claim that, through them, you are buying “real” followers (in contrast to bots). This is a deliberate lie, designed to lure people into the black market of this particular provider. Any followers that are purchased are either bots or scripts that have commandeered random users’ accounts.
There are many ways bots operate. This is a photo of one of the countless bot-farms around the world where thousands of phones are all being controlled by a master script. Source: Random Chinese dude in China
Anyone can look into their own Instagram stats to see where their followers are coming from. There are a few geographies where these scripts are popular, like India and Turkey. I was very curious as to the type of followers we were getting on our fake Influencer account, @genttravel, so we dove into the Instagram stats to find out. Were our followers real people? Were they a mix of real people and bots? Were they just bots?
When I looked, I found they were… mostly bots. Which isn’t surprising, considering that I bought and paid for most of them.
Here’s an example of a few of Tane’s followers. On Day 7 of starting @genttravel, when the account was at about 2,400 followers, we looked at his five most recent followers. We’ll get into more around identifying fakes a little later—consider this a preview.
These are the five most recent followers that we purchased for @genttravel.
All five of these followers were following between 7,490 and 7,500 people. Many were following exactly 7,500, as you’ll see below, which means that they are likely bots following the maximum number of accounts that they can.
Since these accounts are all probably fake, I like to give these bots robust personalities and ribald histories (for the ones who are of age), to fill in some of the blanks. This one seems like the kind of guy who might work in a mobile phone store. I can see my own eyes glazing over as he explains different coverage plans to me.
The one looked pretty attractive and seemed to be into some kind of kinky yoga, so I was a bit disappointed she wasn’t real. And then I did a Google reverse image search and figure out this bot scraped photos from an actual account of @jenselter, who I am pretty sure does the yoga half.
As I write this in 2018, this kid must be four years old. He’s a pretty smarmy four-year-old, so that is kind of impressive. He’s no Lil’ Tay, but he’s trying to be a flexer, so I give him credit for that.
The only one with any history on Socialblade.com was the final one, @arodriguesmuniz2014. If you look at the pattern below, you can see the typical valleys and peaks defined by a follow/unfollow pattern.
N
otice the small span of follow and unfollow waves over the past two years. His count of followers never goes under 7,440 people, and yet he has a massive amount of activity. This type of pattern is a clear indication of automated bot behavior. Source: Socialblade.com
I took screenshots of all these accounts in April of 2018. Below are screenshots taken in October of 2018. You’ll see these bot accounts are still active, but the number of people they are following has been reduced in some cases.
So your girlfriend rolls a Honda, playin’ workout tapes by Fonda. But Fonda ain’t got a motor in the back of her Honda.
Hey, maybe I was right about this guy working at a mobile phone store!
Alas, the 4-year-old smarmy-bot was removed by Instagram. Well done, Instagram. Cue the sarcastic slow-motion golf clap.
Where Do Bots Get the Photos?
No, there aren’t little robots running around taking robot selfies and uploading them while having robot coffee.
So, where do the photos populating these accounts come from?
It is very easy to write a script that “scrapes” (steals) photos and text data from other people’s Instagram accounts. Such a script can even scrape images directly from Google’s image search. Some scraping techniques are better than others and can pull together a set of images that look alike.
Many bot accounts are sloppily assembled, like this one, which has a hodgepodge of random pictures. Other bot accounts are savvier and stick to a theme.
Above is @talaalgassem, an example of what I believe to be a bot. It is one of the bots that follows and comments on @miss.everywhere’s posts (who we will meet in the next chapter), and usually comments with emojis. With many of these bots, you can see they just put any kind of picture into their feed to appear somewhat authentic. Where did the bot get the profile photo? I did a reverse Google search on this and it turns out that photo is of the glamorous Pakistani actress Mahira Khan (whose actual account is @mahirahkhan). It’s very easy for bots to scrape from millions of real faces as they generate fake accounts.
I found this photo using Google Image search, which found the same image used in millions of places.
Many of the faces you see on bot accounts will be actual faces they’ve stolen from real accounts or the web, as seen above. However, some faces may not even be real people at all. NVIDIA (which is a legitimate company), recently perfected a new photo generation technique that can randomly create an infinite number of faces that look 100% authentic, as you can see below.
None of these are real people. They are all computer-generated faces. Source: NVIDIA
I added some more fake faces from NVIDIA because I think it is so interesting. Using similar technology, it’s also possible to put real people’s faces onto existing videos of other talking heads, making it appear as if the person is saying something they’ve never said. This is called “deepfake” technology, and it’s getting harder and harder to detect. Soon, it will be impossible to tell if any photo or video is real or not.
Innovative Bot Techniques
Bots are being programmed in increasingly creative ways, allowing them to manipulate real accounts into following new users. The following example comes from Lauren Bath (@laurenepbath) and describes how users can set up automated programs to identify someone in their target audience and flatter that user into following them.
Let’s say the aspirational Influencer wants to be a Travel Influencer. First, they’ll identify a number of legitimate Influencers in that niche. Next, they’ll assign their new bot a series of tasks to target followers of these Influencers, based on the followers’ activity.
Bath explained how this works. “User X (the Influencer) selects me as one of their targets. [Their] bot is set to go after all the users that engage with my posts within ten minutes of it going live. The bot can go to these accounts, like ten [of their] photos, comment on two photos, and then leave and go to the next account.
“So, the bot is targeting REAL and ACTIVE users that are already interested in travel Influencers. These [targeted] users get a big hit of engagement from the bot and the next minute, they’re following back,” said Bath.
They Aren’t All Bots—Sometimes They Are You!
One day, I tried to follow someone on Instagram. I was surprised to be unable to follow them. The app said I had exceeded the cap of 7,500 people, which is the maximum number of users that a single account is allowed to follow.
I couldn’t figure it out at first. I usually only follow friends, other photographers, and models, so I wondered how that was possible. I know I didn’t follow 7,500 of them. Who were these people I was following?
To figure it out, I downloaded an app called Cleaner. Cleaner organized all the accounts I’m following into a visual view, so I could pick which ones to unfollow. When I opened it up, I was mesmerized by some of the people I was following! I didn’t follow all these people... did I? How could this happen? Sure, sometimes I drunk-follow people like @seesallyeat, but not this many of them.
So how did this happen? How did my account decide to follow another account, without my knowledge?
Most likely what happened is this: as a heavy Instagram user , I use a number of “add-on” services that integrate with Instagram. Some of them show you interesting statistics, make photo books from your Instagram photos, make prints, calendars, etc. I gave my username and password to a few of these, all of which seemed legitimate at the time.
At least one of those third parties took that information and deployed a script to commandeer my account, using it to follow wannabe Influencers. Unbeknownst to me, and before I notice anything is amiss, my account is following about 5,000 other accounts, none of which I had any interest in.
What might look like an innocuous stat-tracking website may also have a side-business, where they reuse your username and password in ways you don’t expect.
Here is an example of the secure way to log into a third-party website. With it, you don’t have to enter your Instagram login details, because you’re already securely logged in, perhaps in another tab. This is from Chatbooks—a good example of how to do this securely. Source: chatbooks.com
Here is an example of a sketchy third-party site, that is asking me to type in my username and password. I won’t say what website it is, because I have no evidence they are doing anything untoward. But I can say it is from one of the biggest Instagram statistics collection websites.
After I discovered I was following 5,000+ people I had never heard of, I was annoyed enough to show Instagram security, and ask them what was going on. Instagram told me that this scenario is all too common because many people give their login details to third parties. The security team was unable to do anything about it, and I got to spend a really exciting week manually unfollowing almost everyone and cleaning up my personal Instagram account. Since the Instagram security team was also unable to pinpoint which service was responsible for the mysterious follows, they can’t prevent it from happening again.
In this book, I often use websites as examples. That said, it is important to note that the vast majority of the people in the world only use their mobile phone to access the internet and are largely leveraging mobile apps to do many of the same things. Just as these websites ask you for your Instagram login details, innocuous-looking apps will do the same thing, with the same undesirable results.
I searched for “Instagram Stats” on the Google Play store. There are thousands and thousands of apps out there that can connect to your Instagram and will ask you to type in your username and password. Source: Google Play Store
Above, you can see a ton of apps that help track your Instagram stats. I installed about 10 of those above and 100% of them asked for my Instagram login details. I am not saying asking for a username and password is nefarious, but that information could certainly be used in a covert manner. Remember, any time you give access to your Instagram login details, a third party can now do anything they want with your account. It’s neve
r a good idea to share your username and password with people you don’t trust.
Note—it’s also possible that one of these services was hacked and my credentials were handed over to malicious actors in that way. This is absolute speculation on my part, but if hackers can gain access to some of the biggest corporations in the world with first-class security, it would be a lot easier to hack into any of the thousands of websites that contain a list of Instagram usernames and passwords.
I used an app called Cleaner to unfollow all these people I never personally followed. It didn’t work that well, and over a week, I spent about an hour each day manually unfollowing about 5,000 people inside of Instagram. It’s a very slow and time-consuming process.
As the Instagram security team said, this sort of misuse of credentials is a fairly common problem. To validate, I Googled “Why am I automatically following people on Instagram?” and saw several sites where Instagrammers were discussing the issue. No one could figure out which websites were using their information in a clandestine manner, but I did find out that once these third parties have your login and password, they can even like and comment on your behalf too. Scary, right?
Under the Influence- How to Fake Your Way Into Getting Rich on Instagram Page 7
