I was just thinking after something that happened to me a few days ago, people find ways to be shady and borderline criminal in everything...

And I haven't even begun to search for the dragon art IG accounts, but I imagine there are lots of those for sale too. :(

That's terrible! >:c

Ugh what is wrong with some people.

Instant audience for your real product. Eyeballs to advertise directly to, pretty much,

Apparently fraud and theft are more fun. I wouldn't know. My ads were done legit and not by stealing people's art. Hell, I've been advertising  rgibson's Griffin Ranger for a while by *commissioning her* and posting the commissions, so she benefits from both ends.

This is both cheaper and more effective, because you get to present your ads as content, (i.e. not ignored or filtered), to all of the account's followers, (i.e. you don't pay per impression).

As for why you would want fake followers: A large number of followers is one of the ways you get more followers. A mix of the system presenting it to people as a suggested interest, ("a lot of people seem to like this, perhaps you will too"), and being at/near the top of popularity lists, plus the bandwagon effect, ("a million people¹ are following this guy, I don't want to be out of the loop").


1: Well, 50,000 people that includes about a thousand each hosting a thousand bots that follow things and make some rather content-free comments like "kwl" and "more ths plz".

I thought maybe you could use Google Images (or TinEye, or similar image searches from other providers) to look for copies of your own art that people have copied on Instagram, but after a few trial searches, it doesn't seem to be easy for the image-search services to search Instagram. They find all kinds of hits on Pinterest and other sites, but not Instagram.

I then found an article that says that for services like Google Images to index an Instagram account, the owner of the Instagram account has to set permissions on Instagram to allow that to happen. The people that are running Instagram accounts full of stolen images aren't going to turn those permissions on, because then it'd be easy for everyone to see what they are doing.

I wondered if it would be possible to pull image checksums from some kind of Instagram API, that you could then compare to the checksums of your own images. Two problems: 1) the simpler checksums are easily defeated if the Instagram thief simply crops the image a little, or turns a few pixels black in the corner of the image, or similar, and 2) Facebook appears to be nerfing the Instagram API, now that everybody is worried about Facebook monitoring their life. (FB is IG's parent company.)

So... no good answers from technology, so far.

I am not associated with Instagram, Facebook, or any other company or site mentioned.