Would you buy a used Twitter account for $900? At first glance, @Droopy735 (permanent ID 84861619) looks like a well-established, popular account - it's over a decade old and has over 100 thousand followers, after all. What's not to like? (As it turns out, a lot.)
Despite being created in 2009, @Droopy735 gained almost all of its 104K followers in November 2021, and none of these newly-created followers has ever liked a tweet.
The swarm of newly-created accounts that followed @Droopy735 are part of a fake follower botnet consisting of (at least) 197134 accounts, all created in November 2021. None has ever tweeted or liked a tweet, and there are definite patterns in the account names.
As is a relatively common practice with mass-created accounts, the accounts in this botnet use plagiarized profile pics, many of which appear to be swiped from social network VKontakte.
Who has this botnet mass-followed? Mostly cryptocurrency accounts, with @Droopy735 at the top of the list with 104,770 followers from the botnet. 20 accounts have received at least 40,000 followers from this fake follower network.
Here's a slideshow of follow order by creation date scatter plots for the 20 accounts that got the largest infusions of followers from the botnet. The fake followers show up as horizontal streaks (highlighted in red).
Very quick reaction from @Droopy735. . .
Update: @Droopy735's follower count has drooped from over 100,000 to a paltry 14 as a result of Twitter cracking down on the fake follower botnet.
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