That would not be safe

[bappy8]

What can you do about it?
Very little. That is perhaps the scariest thing about this kind of practice. It is impossible to find out who the buyer of the fake followers is and you cannot remove all your new 'fans' at once. You can block them one by one within Instagram, but this takes a lot of time. The only way to prevent this is to shield your account. You then have to accept every new follower before you can be followed. For many influencers this is not a serious option, because your content is then not visible to people who are not followers. This also makes your account less valuable, because real new followers will be added less quickly.

'Suddenly 2000 more people'
Femke is an influencer on Instagram with almost 2,400 followers. Out of nowhere, she suddenly got 2,000 followers. They all turned out to be fake followers. She had not bought them herself and did not know where they came from. The consequences for her account were not pleasant: "The engagement was really bad after that. I would rather have 500 real followers than 5,000 fake ones." On impulse, she created a new account, because she was afraid that she could no longer do anything with her current account, which she had invested a lot of time in.

“A high engagement is important to me, because I bring in customers buy phone number list for my own company with my profile. They won’t find my profile without engagement. In addition, I prefer a connection with real people who follow me because they like me or my content.” It was therefore not an option to leave the fake followers.

Instagram followers

Remove fake followers
Eventually, Femke was given the tip to use a special app to remove the fake followers. She had to pay a few euros for that and log in with her Instagram account details. “I did change my password afterwards,” because Instagram strongly discourages entering your login details anywhere other than on Instagram.

In the app, Femke had to manually select all fake followers, after which the app started blocking the accounts. That takes hours and the phone and the app have to remain open all the time. After a while, her account was cleaned up again, until suddenly 3000 followers were added. In the end, she repeated the process and Femke hopes that it will not happen again. She does not know who the perpetrator is.

Instagram says it will do more against fake accounts on the network, but so far there is not much to see of that. Buying these fake followers as a kind of weapon can therefore become a big problem for smaller influencers in particular.

Want to know more about the shady world of buying fake followers? Check out the video below from NOS Stories or the VPRO documentary #followme .