Why would someone want to sell (or buy) a social media account, like a Discord or Twitch account, for example?
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Because of number of followers. Building up the base of followers is the hardest part of online presence. Instead of working hard for months or years, people buy an already made product and skip this hard part of it. The more followers there is, the more expensive the account will be. That’s because the more followers the account has, the bigger potential revenue it is able to produce. 100 people watching an ad will be immensely different to 1 million people watching the ad. There are numerous other ways of making money as a “content creator”, including selling merchandise, promoting brands and events, creating partnerships with other people/brands. The more people are watching – i.e. the bigger reach, the bigger exposure something gets and thus it’s worth more to offer such service. People like Ronaldo pushes away a bottle of coke and the company tanks over 2 billion in market capitalisation on the stock market and that’s not even intentional really. I’ve read it costs over $1mil for him to make an instagram post about something… That’s an extreme case but it can illustrate why would someone be willing to buy an account on social media platform with big following.
It’s hard to get people to believe something on an account with 0 followers, or even 50,000 followers that’s 2 months old. You have more credibility when you have 500,000 followers that’s been around for years if you’re trying to sell something.
The spiffing brit has a guide on this for YouTube ( they usually patch after his exploits tho)
He basically figured out how to take advantage of the algorithms.
Because the activities such accounts can partake in can be valuable. Any capability can be a weapon given a context.
They can be used for:
– engagement manipulation (views, watchtimes, likes/votes/shares)
– assessment manipulation (votes again, but also stars, ratings, emotion responses (see FB), etc)
– mass abuse (mass flagging/reporting), flooding, malicious advertising
– people manipulation: sowing dissent, posting propaganda, etc.
– circumventing bans/blocks
The more real looking account the higher the price, as it will be that much harder for both automated systems and human moderators to identify fakes.
Note that even if you were able to constrain accounts 1:1 per individual, these kinds of abuse wouldn’t disappear necessarily, it would be just harder and more expensive to scale.
When somebody is buying a low-level normal user account – and not one with thousands of followers – he is using buying it to commit fraud.
Check this account: [https://www.reddit.com/user/Amazed_Alloy/](https://www.reddit.com/user/Amazed_Alloy/)
It used to be a legitimate account, it is not “farmed” with a Chat-GPT bot posting random stuff. It’s user had a keen interest in trading card games, then stopped using it a few years ago.
Then, suddenly, last Saturday, somebody started posting a link to a fraudulent site that lures people to send bitcoin. It is a professional job – an imitation of a medium article by Elon Musk, a fake counter of bitcoin remaining to make you hurry (delete your cookies and it will start over) and a well-timed campaign starting early in the weekend so that the account does not get an immediate ban. This is what people buying accounts do.
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