How to buy an Instagram following

Edwin Lane portrayed himself as an expert pasta cook

My latest Instagram post has been live for less than an hour, and already it’s been liked more than 1,000 times.

I’m quite proud of the photo – it’s the pasta I had for lunch – penne with a lentil ragu – taken from above with a filter, and it’s now easily my most popular Instagram post of all time.

But the truth is just three of the 1,003 likes are from real people. The other 1,000 are fake.

I got the fake likes from a guy called Dries Depoorter – an artist from Belgium who makes technology-based art.

His latest installation is called Quick Fix – a vending machine that dispenses Instagram likes and followers direct to your account for a couple of euros a time.

“I basically have thousands of fake account, and they can follow you or like your latest post,” he tells me.

“What you should learn from this is that the numbers on your screen are not always real.”

The fakers

Dries is creating the fake accounts and likes as part of his modern art – he isn’t doing it for the money. But plenty of other people are.

Across the internet there is a thriving industry in fake Instagram popularity.

A quick search on Google brings up dozens of sites offering as many followers and likes as you are prepared to pay for.

I found 1,000 new followers on sale for $10-15 (£7.70-11.60).

And that’s a problem for the multi-billion dollar industry in influencer marketing that has exploded on platforms like Instagram in recent years.

Major brands now pay influential “instagrammers” huge sums to promote products to their followers in an industry estimated to be worth billions of dollars a year.

The question is whether they’re wasting their money if some of those followers aren’t real.

“We found that 20-30% of influencers will be artificially inflating their metrics in some way, shape or form, whether that be buying fake followers, fake likes, comments or even story views,” says Andrew Hogue, a researcher and developer of IG Audit – an online tool used to estimate the number of fake followers on Instagram profiles.

Make me an influencer

I discovered the world of Instagram fakers when I tried to become an Instagram influencer myself for Business Daily on the BBC World Service.

For advice I went to Harry Hugo, co-founder of Goat, an influencer marketing agency in London that matches brands with influencers.

“You’re looking at about 5,000 followers at the minimum,” he says.

Influencers with millions of followers can command tens of thousands of dollars for a single post, but even those with smaller followings in niche markets claim to make a living out of it – I wanted to see how easy it would be.

“At 5,000 you start to get invited to things for free. And then occasionally you might get £50-100 per post.”

Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50373594