How followers and engagement get faked

What you are actually buying

• Bots: automated accounts with no real person behind them, cheapest and quickest to decay.
• Dormant or recycled accounts: real but abandoned profiles resold in bulk, which look more convincing and still do not engage.
• Stolen-identity clones: bots dressed in names and photos scraped from real people.
• Engagement pods: groups of real users who like and comment on cue, which are harder to spot because the engagement is genuinely human.

The tells, and the decay

The clearest signal is the engagement ratio. Pick ten ordinary posts and compare the likes and comments to the follower count; a large account pulling a tiny fraction of a percent is a flag, while a smaller, genuine one often runs higher. The benchmarks shift, so treat them as rough rules of thumb, not verdicts. The second signal is the decay itself: sellers advertise "retention guarantees" that automatically replace followers who drop off, which is a quiet admission that the platforms continuously purge fakes. A bought audience is a leaky bucket you have to keep topping up, and the day you stop paying, it drains.

The limit

The regulators have acted here, most notably the first action against a seller of fake followers, and buying fake social indicators is now directly unlawful in places. But the honest limit is that engagement benchmarks vary by niche and account size, and a real account can have an off week, so no single number convicts. And the deeper point is the familiar one: a bought audience is a vanity metric that converts nothing, while a real one, earned slowly, is the thing no purge can take away.