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Comment by danielamitay | Hacker News Reader

Every single account I checked has constantly retweeted the account @Swagstro[1]. They have 314k followers, but no "Verified Account" tag (which extremely popular users tend to have). I don't mean to point the finger, but it seems like these accounts were used to boost the popularity of said account.

EDIT: They gained 70k followers in the past two days alone[2].

EDIT 2: Their tweets have all disappeared since posting this comment.

CONCLUSION: Automatically generated accounts, profiles, and tweets. These accounts are used for services that provide paid followers and retweets. It's actually pretty interesting stuff if you look at the automatically generated "Twitter Ipsum" that is their profile descriptions and how they randomly pick quotes from famous people to tweet.

[1] https://twitter.com/#!/Swagstro

[2] http://twittercounter.com/Swagstro

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Fascinating stuff. I guess the grey ecosystem is evolving on Twitter. A look at his followers - https://twitter.com/#!/Swagstro/followers - implies nearly all are fake just from their descriptions... not the '18 luv sex lol' fake but some sort of algorithmically generated description that seems legit until you compare it with all his other followers. Most are a riff on the following: "Thinker. Writer. Bacon buff. Typical music ninja. Extreme entrepreneur. Web geek. Social media fan. Devoted reader. Subtly charming troublemaker".

Anyone know anything more about this? Are there companies overtly selling followers?

If you look at who that account is following, there seems to be a whole network of people using accounts with names close to (or impersonating) celebrities who all re-tweet each other and promise "10 follow-backs for each follow" and "if you follow <random> I'll follow you" etc.

Looks like either some kind of weird social hack/club or I don't know what..

This account has close to 1M followers, and appears to be in that same network or loop of spammy follower-harvesting group..

https://twitter.com/#!/CraveMyThoughts

Actually, that account looks pretty legit (in the sense that it's not 100% bot generated).

Look at Swagstro's follower list [1], and Cmd/Ctrl-F for "holic", "fanatic", "introvert", "bacon", "wannabe". Almost all of the accounts are simply randomly generating the Lorem Ipsum of Twitter descriptions.

[1] https://twitter.com/#!/Swagstro/followers

This makes me wonder if Twitter is ever going to crack down on these spam accounts, or put in place some preventive measures. Right now it's really encouraging for spammers to create these accounts and sell their services. There's still lots of room for improvement in these bot accounts, currently they're still too easy to detect.

@Swagstro is following 65 people. The first user @Swagstro follows is @Rene (with 918k followers!).

Some big weekly jumps in March (~50k) and April (~30k).

Magic SEO? Or the next JB? Something to do with clothing?

The domain "swagst.ro" is currently available for US$37 per year...

[1] https://twitter.com/#!/Rene (Verified Twitter Account)

[2] http://twittercounter.com/compare/Rene/3month/followers

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