Who’s Running the Vincere Bot Network on Instagram?
Thousands of fake Instagram accounts are powering scams targeting influencers. The scams are run by different people, but are the bots?
I was in the middle of a work trip — the first since Covid — when an obvious bot account claiming to be a scout for a streetwear brand left a comment on a honey trap I had set up to study Instagram bots. “Collab? DM @ vincerewears”
This was a pleasant surprise. I had set up my second Instagram account purely to facilitate my hobby tracking and studying the behavior of fake accounts on social networks, but even though I called it a honey trap on the profile I did not expect any bots to interact with it directly. I assumed (incorrectly) that making the honey trap effective as a honey trap would require activities that were likely to ensnare legitimate Instagram users as well.
At first I thought about ignoring the bot. It was super obvious that this was a scam, and scammer bots weren’t really what I wanted to focus on. But I couldn’t help my curiosity because the honey trap account had no followers whose provenance was not known to me, used no hashtags on posts, and wasn’t at the time following anybody else. So where did this little bot come from? I couldn’t resist. I needed to look…
