Instagram question - fake profiles?

[Andy Into The Wild]

Hi all,

I had an influx of about 60 followers last night, however when looking through them they seem a bit suspicious as they all seem to be accounts about "luxury goods" or "travel"...here are some example names:
- luxury_infinity_ways
- highend.luxury.mansion
- luxury_hotspotter

and so on.

I'm pretty sure they are fake accounts, but they seem to have thousands of followers each.

Any idea why this influx might have been triggered and how to prevent/remove these likes from my account? I don't really want a bunch of bots following me.

 

[FruitFlakes]

It depends on what you've followed/liked/hashtagged recently. For example I recently followed a photo agency's account and a bunch of smaller agent accounts/accounts related to them started liking and following me. Bots keep an eye on larger accounts' new followers/likes and then target the new accounts. No way to prevent it aside from going private, you can also remove them as followers.

 

[Andy Into The Wild]

Thanks, I'll have a look through my recent hashtags and see if any of those are the issue.

 

[ashtennisguru]

^^^ Yeah, it's a weird but not uncommon thing. A friend of mine started teaching yoga and created an account for her new business so I followed her new page, within a few days I had about 10 new yoga account followers. I also got followed by a dog related page and then had an influx of dog related followers too.

It's all the people with automated accounts - the bots look for similar content or content that followers follow.

 

[popcorn]

Mine is Russian tattooists!

 

[Major Eazy]

Hi all,

Any idea why this influx might have been triggered and how to prevent/remove these likes from my account? I don't really want a bunch of bots following me.

No matter what social media you sign up for, you will always get fake profiles following you, hoping you would think if they follow you, then you would return the favour and follow them. It even happens on Pinterest too. It will happen with any social media websites.

It depends on what you've followed/liked/hashtagged recently. For example I recently followed a photo agency's account and a bunch of smaller agent accounts/accounts related to them started liking and following me. Bots keep an eye on larger accounts' new followers/likes and then target the new accounts. No way to prevent it aside from going private, you can also remove them as followers.

@LojikDub : This guy, FruitFlakes is correct. You follow another profile, you like an Instagram posting, you like a comment, you tag a posting as a favourite, and the system suggest something of similar interest to you. For example, I followed anyone who posts about Land Rover, I ended up having one or two followers who are Land Rover owners.

In any social media, stopping them is a lot harder, and needs a lot of tricks. Sadly in any social media, it is mostly a case of remove them.