How do the “buy followers” services work?

Question

Recently, the number of "follower sellers" has increased dramatically. They offer Twitter users to increase their number of followers in exchange for money. I didn't know about those services earlier, but they have started to intensely use spam messages for advertising recently. There are services like fast-follow.com and buyfollowers.eu.

I never approve those web services. I think it comprises some kind of cheat. You give some money and you get 100,000 followers. Who are these followers? Fake accounts? Or real users whose accounts are abused? Is it legal to do this?

In short, can you provide some info about this business and how their system works?

Answer 1

You're generally right - For the most part, you're looking at completely 'Bot' accounts, particularly for "high quantity purchases". Even though you can usually identify bot accounts, they're almost entirely pointless because they don't do anything. Without actual engaged followers (RTs, @mentions, etc.), the high count does very little.

Lately, there have also been services popping up for 'Getting Paid to Tweet' and follow. For all practical purposes, people can 'rent' their Twitter account to ad agencies to do with what they will - depending on the influence of their Twitter account, it may be slightly more effective, but more than likely just opens the door for the creation and rental of more bots.

Answer 2

@mehper This question is similar to that of "Faking Advertisement clicks". Their would be some group of people who are paid to click the ads that appear in the webpages specially google ads. They call it work from home and all those nonsense stuff.

Similarly , these may be the bunch of hoaxers who create fake id's and tweet in the name of famous ppl , brand etc, just to attract more users, there by trafficking ad income!