(Obviously I am not five so you can explain this as if I am a dumb 27 year old). These bots reply to any even vaguely popular post now, but how are they making anyone money? Just from impressions? Are people fooled by them? Is money changing hands?
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Cost to make such a bot: effectively zero.
If even one person from hundreds of thousands who see it gets tricked into downloading a virus, giving up blackmail material, or even just becoming a paying customer, the bot makes more than it cost.
Internet and phone scams in general work based off sheer numbers. If I can put my malicious ad in front of 100,000 people and expect only 1% to fall for it. That’s still 1,000 people. Online scam/malicious ads tend to be viruses which allows me to gather information which I can later resell for thousands of dollars in bundles of 100 or more people. And it’s very little effort to set up these bots.
So it’s low effort to get a bot in front of a lot of people. If even 1% of those people click on it, that’s still enough for me to bundle and sell for thousands of dollars in profit.
Think of it like panning for gold. Very little gold flakes exist even in the richest sands. You may expect to find only a quarter of an ounce of gold each day. That quarter of an ounce is still worth more than $500. So the effort is worth the small return of actual gold.
“In short, this is why PIB accounts exist: If just one unfortunate X user clicks through — and through, and through, and through — and ultimately signs up for a scam dating site, the site’s owner makes bank, and maybe a freelance PIB spammer gets a few bucks.”
From this article in New York Magazine:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/who-is-behind-all-the-pussy-in-bio-porn-spam-on-x.html
There was an article in the New Yorker a few weeks ago explaining exactly this: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/who-is-behind-all-the-pussy-in-bio-porn-spam-on-x.html
Every once in a while I get a FB friend request from an attractive young woman with a lot of photos, no history and obviously, no, I don’t know her at all and we have no friends in common
If I look at her FB page, it will be 100 older dudes. Zero people should have friended “her” but 100 did. It’s just the law of large numbers.
It cost virtually nothing to make a bot, If they convince even one horny motherfucker to click on that link and either sign up for some only fans or scam them in some other way they’ve already turned a profit
Combined with the fact that usually victims of these types of scams are too embarrassed to really ever seek legal action even if they could figure out the identity of the person behind the bot and makes it a relatively low risk high reward thing to do
As a bot maker you have pretty much nothing to lose and everything to gain
Here’s pretty much the two likely outcomes of clicking that link. The first outcome being it actually takes you to some sort of porn site with most likely stolen images that’s designed just enough to look like a real sight and then when you sign up for it it’s going to steal your payment information and steal your money with that
The other outcome is that it’s going to stick you into some other scam like trying to convince you to download a random program or something like that which is obviously a virus to do whatever the person wants, usually something like scraping login tokens from popular social media platforms to steal your other accounts for either ransom or to add them to a botnet
Barely any cost, and a horny person might click if they like what they see. Not many people would click, but even if one in 1000 clicks and falls for it, that already makes them a profit. They tend to post on whatever the most trending thing is, be it big news or memes or whatever, so they easily get way more than 1000 views.
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