Instagram Info

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Alex Mucci Before & After

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Another cost-saving tactic for instagram scammers: you don’t need to buy likes if the post is a video, since the only number displayed on your feed is the number of views (video views can ALSO be bought, as you can see above).  Why else would Alex Mucci’s sky-high number of likes per post suddenly plummet on that video clip she posted?  It’s because she’s savvy and knows that her paltry number of likes is hidden from view.  Social metric sites like Ninjalitics help to reveal this deception, but it only displays the 12 most recent posts, so once Alex deletes her shout-out post for stalkersidney and posts two more photos, her deception will be hidden from view.  You can still view it in the app if you open her post and click the number of views, it will show who and how many people liked the video.

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New post, new crop of automated spam comments.  This account represents @dollskill so that tells you something about their taste in brand reps.

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UPDATE: In a stunning turn of events, Alex Mucci has retrieved the 101k followers from the farplane!  Yes, although she frantically bought 17k new followers to replenish what she had lost, she didn’t need to!  Instead of losing 100k, she has now gained more than 17k followers compared to what she had 24 hours ago.  Now, the fact that she does buy followers is a given, and there’s no telling why Instagram has unraptured all those accounts that were following her, but at least she doesn’t need to keep buying new followers in bulk to maintain her image.  We can see from the above though, that she lost only 85k net followers and gained back 107k, signaling that she did indeed buy 17k followers for herself today.  I don’t know if the fakes are going to keep flooding in, whether she arranged for them to be added on throughout the day in a set amount of whether she will try to turn it off.  It is still pretty suspicious that she’s suddenly GAINED so many, instead of losing them.  Time will tell.

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UPDATE: Roughly 4 hours after I posted my initial Ninjalitics assessment of how many followers Alex Mucci lost in the purge, she seems to have gone from -96594 to -86556!  10,000 new followers in just a few hours...What a turnaround!  And wouldn’t you know, 99% of these new followers are from Brazil, I mean, what are the odds?  Brazil must really be feeling love for her right now, for whatever reason.

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UPDATE: since my last post where I included the photo on top displaying “-96594″ as the number of followers lost, I screenshotted Alex Mucci’s Ninjalitics a little under twenty minutes ago “-92617″ and just now “-92046.”  This indicates that this account has been purchasing fake followers at a rate of roughly 30 followers/minute!  This may be an attempt to buy back all 100,000 followers she lost during the Instagram purge before it is reflected on social metric sites like Social Blade and Ninjalitics.  I will update again if she stops buying them but it seems unlikely at this point, there is plenty of time for her to purchase many thousands of new followers to hide her misdeeds. ;)

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In the wake of the Instagram purge, Alex Mucci lost over 100,000 followers, but in the last two or three hours, she has mysteriously regained 10,000 of them.  These new followers are fake as well, but look for that number of lost followers on 13-02-2019 to continue dropping as she frantically purchases new followers to replace the ones that were erased.

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How to Spot a Scammer Update: a new photo was posted this morning, and within one hour it had over 700 comments.  As seen above, a string of more than 80 comments that appear to be generic flattering adjectives ripped from a paragraph, many with attached commas.  There were also the typical blocks of dozens of emojis strings as well, as well as the copies of short pickup lines that Alex Mucci pays to have posted onto her Instagram photos. @instagram

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Here we see another example of the type of spam bot accounts paid to comment on Instagram.  These spam accounts are just regurgitating a string of blindly positive adjectives, complete with commas in many cases.  Over a hundred of these comments were just posted in bulk about three hours ago. @instagram

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How to spot fake instagram comments, tips & tricks

Many of us know that some wannabe-influencers on Instagram resort to purchasing followers in order to boost their social media credentials.  The downside to this method is that it can harm your engagement if your follower-to-like/comment ratio drops too low.  To combat this problem, many aspiring influencers have been purchasing likes and comments in order to disguise their artificial follower count.  There are some simple ways to spot these fake accounts however, displayed above with one such Instagram user.

Things to look for:

- huge numbers of similar comments posted within one hour: in the above example, Alex Mucci received massive numbers of comments (500+) in waves over the couple of days since this imageset was posted.  The comment types vary a bit, ranging from strings of semi-random emojis, awkwardly pasted pick-up lines, and dubious generic comments (look for “cool beard” and “best pranker” on many of her posts).

- accounts with heavily-skewed follower-following ratios: there’s some variation as a few of the spam accounts have been around for a while, but generally the accounts leaving comments on Mucci’s posts have less than 200 followers but are following more than 5000 accounts, often 7500 accounts.  This is a strong indicator that her comments are purchased, rather than genuine engagement.

- the accounts leaving these comments are not following the account they are commenting on: highlighted with @netflix_chile_premiumm above, these purchased comments do not represent a truly engaged audience.  As fake accounts, they do not indicate a huge fanbase and any brand seeking to partner with an influencer utilizing fake comments, likes, and followers is going to end up hurting their bottom line in the end.  While many companies employ social media teams trained to spot fake influencers, not all companies do.  Utilizing fake followers, comments, and likes has led Mucci to brand endorsements from fashion companies such as @fashionova and @dollskill among others.

In addition, some of the spam accounts being used for these posts appear to have existed for some time.  While some of the accounts are obviously fake, others have posts dating back a year or more and appear to have been real at one point before possibly having control taken by whichever company Mucci purchases her comments from.  It’s unclear at this point, but one would hope that @instagram is doing something about these spam accounts.

What do you think of influencers who purchase followers and likes?