The fake number momentum on Cardano NFTs
Manipulation is a very old art and applied daily in different types of segments, and in one of them it has been used to trick you. This article is too big for an e-mail.
Creators and opportunists use momentum to make you see only the surface and believe it's real, making bad actors' entry into the community much easier.
We have a very problematic fever in the NFT market and it grows more and more because we get used to digesting chewed content, and this digestion often turns into a stomach ache after a rug pull.
The illusion we are buying is numbers. And these numbers cost less and less to obtain and through these numbers we inflate something unreal and harmful to the community.
Money is a very powerful tool and it can be applied in many ways to generate more money, and that's the hole we're in.
You know about social media bots, but do you know how they work?
I will focus here on 3 specific ones; Twitter, Instagram, and Discord.
There are several types of branches of digital marketing and one of them emerged a long time ago, it is called black hat marketing.
Black hat marketing is the use of unethical (and sometimes, but not always, illegal) strategies to promote online business, this ranges from SEO, and cold list email marketing to social media marketing.
Twitter and Instagram
If you think that back in 2008 there was already this type of service for Twitter and we had a limited technology between migrating from web1 to web2, now imagine how this hasn't become easier these days with new programming languages and APIs, and because it has become easy, using these techniques has become a cheap way to cheat and inflate numbers.
Not to mention that a few years ago you would need to look for a quality SMM panel, search forums like in the picture, and look for reliable sellers. Today you can find it on Google easily and quickly.
We'll start by talking about the bluebird app, our dear Twitter. For the NFT community, Twitter has become the social network of choice number 1 to connect, interact and discover new projects and communities, it allows you to create and give your opinion and talk by yourself, unlike discord, no server owner can censor you.
Twitter, like most social networks, allows you to follow, be followed, like, comment, share, and recently subscribe to newsletters directly from the profile, and all these actions can be bought.
For all SMM services, there are different categories to make the illusion real; niches. If you're Korean, it's possible to buy Korean followers, or if you're Arab, Arab followers. And in our case, is possible to buy NFTs fake accounts, and they will trick you.
Here the managers of these smm services enter a site like opensea and run a crawler to save many images at once, using the same script that creates multiple accounts to create profiles using the NFTs images gathered, in addition to being able to do the same with original bios on Twitter and complete the "fake account that looks real" package.
That's how NFT Targeted Services for Twitter was born, and don't be fooled into thinking that only followers are bought. It is possible to buy retweets, likes, and comments from the same bots that followed you.
The price ranges on different SMM panel providers and depends on how much each account looks real, or the service is an automatic package of delivery, or they, as you want to do, are selling an illusion for “real 100% organic” accounts.
PANEL 1
PANEL 2
PANEL 3
On Google, you can find resellers of these services with a profit margin on top, don’t expect much, just a better interface/system to buy.
All the same can be applied to Instagram, the difference can be found in the type of services since Twitter and Instagram work with different features.
With that, the project creates a non-existent hype, and when this is done, real interactions derived from FOMO start to appear, this is where we fall by entering the account profile and seeing activity (retweets, generic comments, and likes), and if we do a proof check on the followers, we are going to see activity too, and you already know why.
This is a recipe used by many creators in our own community, from rug pullers to currently known project owners (cough cough). It works and will keep working.
Discord
Some pseudo influencers include "lack of activity" and "difference between too many offline and too few online members" as red flags and that's a pretty cool way to misinform. Services providers are not that dumb and mostly project creators are not too, small fishes can be caught on this, but the smart and big ones don’t.
The idea of blackhat social media marketing is to replicate, in a “real way”, interaction. If there is a problem that needs to be replicated, there will be some kind of solution.
Discord services include shilling on specific channels; auto DMs for all members of a server list; buying offline members, buying online members, engaging in the chat of choice, or promoters who create hype and ask questions.
So “lack of activity” and “online/offline members count” is a dumb way to look. If you’re following up on some major drops in this space for a while you will see that after launch the online/offline ratio has big drops.
PANEL 1
PANEL 2
PANEL 3
PANEL 4
PANEL 5
You can also find gigs on websites like Fiverr where the service of “engaging” and “ nft community talk” can be offered for a cheap price.
Account Sellers
Another type of service offered is the sale of accounts, these account sellers use the good faith of users to participate in giveaways, usually fake, that will never be paid.
It is possible to focus on a specific community, like Cardano NFTs, and create giveaways daily, if each giveaway creates 100~200 followers of interaction with a fake giveaway, at the end of the month you will have a considerable amount of followers from that space.
When this process ends, the entire account history is deleted, the name changed and it is sold or used in a new project, which miraculously starts with an absurd hype overnight, the same happens with "locked discords" that open with more than 3 thousand members.
This is a frequently used tactic and projects start between 800~1200 "organic" followers
How to identify botted accounts
You can’t determine for real who is a bot without buying some followers in a random account and checking who they follow (hello, $hosky).
The first step to trying it is searching around the “followers” from the account you want to check and opening some profiles to dig in. One of the points you want to look at is the following/follower ratio, those bots are used to follow many accounts (clients) from the panel and you can identify them by it, but it could just be a random guy trying the lucky in all giveaways he sees, try to get down and see the first 0~600 followers, the first ones will be the hype train move.
Dumb creators will hire any follower types or will have a high range of profile pictures not related to CNFT accounts, mostly ETH PFP. Think by yourself if you know someone or a large number of people from ETH that like Cardano and would be following a newborn CNFT project.
Another way is the media/likes posts, if this person just retweets and comments on random NFT giveaways or random projects posts are more likely to be one too, even the most ghost users on Twitter make part in contests and talk about projects, do shoutouts, comment on non-giveaway or project introduction posts or interact with real accounts that don’t need bots at all.
But this doesn’t mean anything until you buy some fake followers and check who bought them, sometimes people are just afraid to interact and you can misunderstand information.
Discord
Interactions on discord are easy to track. Search for a friend in the community and you will see in-common servers, rich content profiles, and maybe some mutual friends.
I’ll use Captain Cyborg as an example here, we have some projects in common, the biggest marketplace of our blockchain and community discords.
When you find some “fake” engagers or bot online users will be easy to check that they only have the same server as mutual
It really depends on how many projects are you in and in that case, being a member of many of CNFT project’s discord can help you find out if you're being made a fool or not by some project founders, if they do that to you, they're probably not here to create a strong community.
Dumb creators will hire a lot of offline bots or make “invite contests” to bring more speculators to the community. Charlatans will hire both and engagement, creating the false sense that a large community exists, when in fact it will be made by you and a few other members who have also fallen for this scam.
Who cares?
Wrapping Up
It's very easy to get access to bots, buy accounts, followers, and engagement, and break the whole concept of "red flags" with a little investment.
A group that performs rug pulls in series can easily afford this in several profiles, not paying attention to this cycle can be harmful to your pocket.
There is no security on the internet, and numbers on social media will always have a bypass to fraud. The only way to understand the strength of a community is in how it treats the project in the secondary market after the mint. Whether the project has yet to release depends a lot on the value that community members place on the project.
Look to buy projects where more people you know are involved and try to always double-check some points we talked about here in this article: followers from the account, interactions on the publications, same monkey-see monkey-do comments on posts.
And, anyone can buy followers for any public profile, so, someone can just want to pump their bags.
That was long, huh?
But I bet you as a good Orc learned some useful things here!