Fraud would imply malice and criminal intent. What is criminal about paying for fake followers?
Here's the basic black's law dictionary definition:
An intentional misrepresentation of material existing fact made by one person to another with knowledge of its falsity and for the purpose of inducing the other person to act, and upon which the other person relies with resulting injury or damage.
The most obvious one is that you could could spend money on her as an advertiser, over someone else.
But people are crazy. There are super-weird fact patterns in fraud cases out there.
I mean, it might make me decide to listen to them a time or two. It won't for long, though - they need to say something worth hearing for that.
(Disclaimer: The previous paragraph is hypothetical. I don't do social media at all, so I don't follow anyone...)
People buying followers are often competing for commercial opportunities for which social media influence is a key factor in what they are selling to the prospective buyer.
From MW:
* intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right
* an act of deceiving or misrepresenting
In other words, yes, fraud, your ticket to the 8th Circle of hell.
Companies need to do their research and ask the right questions before they part with their money...
Sure it is, it's omission of a material fact. You know the person is trying to get through to real people. You know the number of actual people who are followers is smaller than the real number (through your intentional act of buying them), and you know this is material to the person you are talking to. If they suffer legal injury, congrats, you committed fraud.
This is pretty basic stuff. The kind of logic parsing you are attempting is not how the law works.
"Companies need to do their research and ask the right questions before they part with their money..."
While generally true, it's irrelevant here. This is a thing you would definitely have a duty to disclose (for a ton of reasons). This would make it ripe for a misrepresentation-type fraud claim.