How to spot Instagram followers

It’s Cheat Week at Mashable. Join us as we take a look at how liars, scammers, grifters, and everyday people take advantage of life's little loopholes in order to get ahead.

Ever wonder how someone got so many Instagram followers? We have great news for your ego: Some of those Buy Instagram Followers. 

It's likely that, even if you've never bought followers, you've still been followed by a few bots. This is largely unavoidable — and many bots are harmless — but you should still report them to Instagram. The more volatile bots might try to phish you by sending spam or harmful links via DM, and it's not worth the risk of keeping them around. 

Instagram cracked down on third-party apps that boost your account using fake followers and likes late last year, promising that there would be repercussions for users who continued to buy bots. (It's unclear what, exactly, those repercussions were.) But that didn't mark the end of fake followers: In fact, according to a survey that made the rounds earlier this week, celebrity accounts like Ellen DeGeneres, BTS, and Ariana Grande have fake follower counts between 46 and 49 percent. According to CNBC, fake followers on influencer accounts will cost brands a total of $1.3 billion this year alone.

How to spot a fake account

To spot a fake account, watch for a few telltale signs. For instance, if you notice a user liking a random assortment of your photos or leaving random, generic comments ("great post!") in rapid succession, there's a good chance it's affiliated with a third-party booster and is trying to tempt you into following it back.  At the very least, it's someone trying to rapidly inflate their follower count — probably not a person you want to follow anyway.

It's also helpful to look at the profile itself. If the user is following thousands of people but doesn't have many followers or posts themselves, or if their account appears to have been inactive for a long time, feel free to be suspicious. Of course, there are sneakier bots who do post a lot of content in an attempt to appear real. If you're not sure, pop a photo or two into a reverse Google image search and see if it's been lifted from another user — or another website entirely. 

And we've all seen those super obvious fake accounts. There's the bot that posts a bunch of stolen photos of different women as if you will not notice they're not the same person. Then there's the fake discount account, which promises low prices on luxury items (frequently Ray-Bans) in an attempt to get you to click on a suspicious link.

Let us not forget the most obvious culprit of all: the account with nothing on it. No picture, no posts, no followers. Their handle is "Chloe8438488382" or some garbage like that. Goodbye, bot. You did not even put forth an effort.

Finally, it must be said: Just because someone meets one of these criteria does not automatically make them a bot. They could simply be really bad at Instagram.