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Comment by ryanlol | Hacker News Reader

I think it's quite the stretch to describe someone as a celebrity just because they have 800k instagram followers. And yeah, that site is full of scammers with high follower counts.

I own a couple of nice names and constantly have people with million+ followers messaging me trying to scam me for them.

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Well if you have 500 people willing to pay $500 for a course I would call you a celebrity. Not because of the number of followers, but because of the value of those followers.

She's just tapping a market with a huge demand and no one offering any "supply."

There are no university courses for "instagram star" so if you're the charlatan who is promising fame and fortune for the low low price of $500, there are plenty of people willing to hop on board. If anything I would say 500 people is really low.

I wonder how many people would recognize my name. I’d guess 2,000 tops. Somebody who 800,000 people have heard of seems like a celebrity to me.

Paid followers are a real thing.

Check out these people's website/youtube on Alexa(or similar). They are dead.

Or check out the comments and see how fake/active the posts are.

FWIW @travel_inhershoes actually does have fairly good engagement rates for the follower count.

But given that she probably only runs the one account, that's pretty small time.

Sure, but any company paying an influencer does background research to verify follower counts and activity. Fake influencers may lure unsophisticated companies, but it's much harder to scam the big ones.

How can somebody scam you out of your Instagram name other than you giving / selling it to them?

They pretend to be buying the name and string you along for a while, after a bit they request you swap the name onto a fresh account before they'll send you the money. If you try to swap the name, they'll use a script to automatically register it.

Apparently lots of people fall for this, at least according to the scammers. Given how many DMs I get every day, I don't doubt it at all.

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