Gekaufte Freunde in Social Media
Many are paying for online followers, even fake ones.
The real Jessica Rychly is a Minnesota teenager. When she goes on Facebook or Twitter, she sometimes muses about being bored or trades jokes with friends. Occasionally, she posts a duck-face selfie.
But on Twitter, there is a version of Jessica that none of her friends would recognize. While the two Jessicas share a name, photograph and bio, the other Jessica promoted accounts selling Canadian real estate investments, cryptocurrency and a radio station in Ghana. The fake Jessica retweeted accounts using Arabic and Indonesian, languages the real Jessica does not speak. While she was a 17-year- old high school senior, her fake counterpart promoted pornography, retweeting accounts called Squirtamania and Porno Dan.
All these accounts belong to customers of an American company named Devumi that has collected millions of dollars in a global marketplace for social media fraud. Devumi sells Twitter followers and retweets to anyone who wants to appear more popular or exert influence online. Drawing on an estimated stock of at least 3.5 million automated accounts, each sold many times over, the company has provided customers with more than 200 million Twitter followers, a New York Times investigation found.
At least 55,000 of the accounts use the names, profile pictures and other personal details of real Twitter users, including minors, according to a Times data analysis. “I don’t want my picture connected to the account, nor my name,” Ms. Rychly, now 19, said. “I can’t believe that someone would even pay for it. It is just horrible.”
These accounts are counterfeit coins in the booming economy of online influence, reaching into virtually any industry where a mass audience — or the illusion of it — can be monetized. By some calculations, as many as 48 million of Twitter’s reported active users — nearly 15
percent — are automated accounts designed to simulate real people. In November, Facebook disclosed that it had at least twice as many fake users as it previously estimated, indicating that 60 million fake accounts may roam the world’s largest social media platform.
These fake accounts, known as bots, can help sway advertising audiences, reshape political debates, defraud businesses and ruin reputations. Yet their creation and sale fall into an unclear legal zone.
While Twitter and other platforms prohibit buying followers, dozens of sites sell them.
Devumi’s founder, German Calas, 27, denied that his company sold fake followers and said he knew nothing about social identities stolen from real users. “The allegations are false,” Mr. Calas said in an email exchange in November.
T he Times re - viewed business and court records showing that Devumi has more than 200,000 customers, including television stars, professional athletes, pastors and models.
For pennies each, Devumi offers Twitter followers, views on YouTube, plays on SoundCloud, the music-hosting site, and endorsements on LinkedIn, the professional- networking site. The actor John Leguizamo has Devumi followers. So do Michael Dell, the computer billionaire, and Ray Lewis, the football commentator and former profes- sional player. Kathy Ireland, the onetime swimsuit model who presides over a half- billion- dollar licensing empire, has hundreds of thousands of Devumi followers. Even a Twitter board member, Martha Lane Fox, has some.
At a time when Facebook, Twitter and Google are grappling with an epidemic of political manipulation and fake news, Devumi’s fake followers also serve as phantom foot soldiers in political battles online. Devumi’s customers include both avid supporters and fervent critics of President Donald J. Trump, and both liberal cable pundits and a reporter at the alt- right bastion Breitbart.
An editor at China’s state-run news agency, Xinhua, paid Devumi for hundreds of thousands of followers and retweets on Twitter, which the country has banned but sees as a forum for issuing propaganda abroad. An adviser to Ecuador’s president, Lenín Moreno, bought tens of thousands of followers and retweets for Mr. Moreno’s campaign accounts.
Kristin Binns, a Twitter spokeswoman, said it did not typically suspend users suspected of buying bots, in part because it is difficult to know who is responsible for any given purchase. Unlike some social media companies, Twitter does not require accounts to be associated with a real person. It also permits more automated access than other companies, making it easier to control large numbers of accounts.
“Social media is a virtual world that is filled with half bots, half real people,” said Rami Essaid, the founder of Distil Networks, a cybersecurity company that specializes in eradicating bot networks. “You can’t take any tweet at face value. And not everything is what it seems.”
The Influence Economy
Last year, three billion people logged on to social media networks. The collective yearning for connection has created a new status marker: the number of people who follow, like or “friend” you. For some, this virtual status is a real-world currency. Followers determine who will hire them and how much they are paid.
Follower counts are critical for socalled influencers, tastemakers and YouTube stars whom advertisers now lavish with billions of dollars for sponsorship deals. According to data collected by Captiv8, a company that connects influencers to brands, an influencer with 100,000 followers might earn an average of $2,000 for a promotional tweet, while an influencer with a million followers might earn $20,000.
Most of Devumi’s buyers are selling products, services or themselves on social media. In interviews, their explanations varied. “Everyone does it,” said the actress Deirdre Lovejoy, a Devumi customer.
“It’s fraud,” said James Cracknell, a British rower and Olympic gold medalist who bought followers from Devumi. “People who judge by how many likes or how many followers, it’s not a healthy thing.”
Ms. Ireland has over a million followers on Twitter, which she often uses to promote companies with whom she has endorsement deals. But in January last year, Ms. Ireland had only about 160,000 followers. The next month, an employee at the branding agency she owns, Sterling/Winters, spent about $2,000 for 300,000 more followers, according to Devumi records. A spokeswoman said that the employee had acted without Ms. Ireland’s authorization. Similarly, Ms. Lane Fox, a British e- commerce pioneer, member of Parliament and Twitter board member, blamed a “rogue employee” for a series of follower purchases.
Marcus Holmlund, a young freelance writer, was at first thrilled when Wilhelmina, the international modeling agency, hired him to manage its social media efforts. But when Wilhelmina’s Twitter following didn’t grow fast enough, he said, a supervisor told him to buy followers or find another job. (A Wilhelmina spokeswoman declined to comment.)
According to a recent profile in the British tabloid The Sun, two young siblings, Arabella and Jaadin Daho, earn a combined $100,000 a year as influencers, working with brands such as Amazon, Disney and Nintendo. Arabella, who is 14, tweets under the name Amazing Arabella. But her account, and her brother’s, are boosted by thousands of retweets purchased by their mother and manager, Shadia Daho, according to Devumi records.
Buying Bots
Marketing consultants buy followers for their customers, and sometimes for themselves, too. In 2015, Jeetendr Sehdev, who calls himself “the world’s leading celebrity branding authority,” began buying hundreds of thousands of fake followers from Devumi. He did not respond to requests for comment. But in his recent best-selling book, “The Kim Kardashian Principle: Why Shameless Sells,” he had a different explanation for his rising follower count. “My social media following exploded,” Mr. Sehdev claimed, because he had discovered the true secret to celebrity influence: “Authenticity is the key.”
Among the followers delivered to Mr. Sehdev was Ms. Rychly — or a copy of her. The fake Rychly account was included in the purchase orders of hundreds of Devumi customers. It was retweeted by Arabella Daho. Clive Standen, star of the show “Taken,” ended up with the fake follower. So did the French entertainer DJ Snake and Ms. Ireland.
The fake Ms. Rychly also retweeted at least five accounts linked to a prolific pornographer named Dan Leal, who tweets as @PornoDan. Mr. Leal, who has bought at least 150,000 followers from Devumi in recent years, said in an email that buying followers generated more than enough new revenue to pay for the expense. He was not worried about being penalized, Mr. Leal said, adding, “If Twitter was to purge everyone who did so there would be hardly any of them on it.”
The Social Supply Chain
Around the web are sites where anonymous bot makers connect with retailers like Devumi, selling followers, likes and shares in bulk, for a variety of social media platforms.
Devumi, according to one former employee, sourced bots from different bot makers depending on price, quality and reliability. In just a few years, Devumi sold about 200 million Twitter followers to at least 39,000 customers, accounting for a third of more than $6 million in sales during that period.
Twitter suspended Devumi’s account after this article was published online, and more than a million followers have disappeared from the accounts of prominent users. Yet Twitter has not imposed safeguards that would help throttle bot manufacturers, such as requiring anyone signing up for a new account to pass an anti-spam test.
Some critics believe Twitter has a business incentive against weeding out bots too aggressively. The company has struggled to generate the user growth seen by rivals like Facebook and Snapchat. And outside researchers have disputed its estimates for how many of its users are actually bots.
“We’re working with completely unregulated, closed ecosystems that aren’t reporting on these things. They have a perverse incentive to let it happen,” said Mr. Essaid, the cybersecurity expert. “They want to police it to the extent it doesn’t seem obvious, but they make money off it.”