I was on Instagram and I saw a boy advertising to sell 5k followers and I was wondering, how do they do that? Can they programmically create and control those accounts? I know they can use the Instagram API to some degree but I feel like Instagram probably has security set up to detect that type of stuff (5k accounts following someone at the same time, etc). Does anybody know? I’m actually really curious

They may have actual people set up for this. Labor is very cheap in some countries, specially for such remote work. (Get 100 elder housewives and ask them to man 50 accounts. You pay them for an hour of work a day, or even less)

It's just selling an account with followers.

put in some effort or hire an 3rd world family to be fake followers, gain a few thousand followers with some half assed content, sell the account, transfer it, delete all content and rebrand it.

Happens all the time, there's even markets for this to go and buy an existing prepped account.

@C0D4 no they are adding 5k followers to your account, not selling another account.

It can be done in multiple ways. It can be empty accounts created with bots and controlled with instagram app or actual accounts that given access to that app. This app is owned and controlled by seller and he can make all authorized accounts to follow anyone he wants.

There are sites where you can register and like/follow content for money. It is a big industry for many years. Boting is far harder these days but still possible using capzcha solving services. Yes people solve captchas for a living.

Do people really not understand the bot farms? I have seen pictures of rooms FULL of cell phones programmed to do actions over and over. Rack after rack of cell phones all controlled from a central computer. These farms are used to try and sway opinion about everything from product picks to elections. You are living in a matrix thinking the other participants are always real.

Also pretty sure there are sweat shops doing similar things around the world.

Anyone willing to pay for 5k followers deserves to be ripped and robbed