Jess (not her real name) is a U.K.-based fashion influencer with 230,000 Instagram followers. She worked with 22 different brands in 2018 and charged $1,000 per post.
Those brands didn’t realize that 96 percent of Jess’s engagement is fake, the result of a bot farm she allegedly paid for engagement: $2 for every 1,000 likes, comments or shares. That means that each company Jess worked with likely wasted up to $960.
It’s called “influencer fraud,” a practice spawned after the digitalization of influencer marketing — the latter of which has, in one iteration or another, been around for hundreds of years.
