TikTok’s massive problem with bots, fake accounts and scam

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Even if the real creator reports these accounts to TikTok, they are not necessarily deleted. This is what happened to Charlotte Jessop, who talks in her videos about how to best reduce debt and cut spending. With the success of her videos and account during the pandemic, she became an increasingly frequent target of scam accounts that pretended to be her and sometimes contacted her followers to steal money out of their pockets. After she reported various accounts, she was told by TikTok that no violation of their community guidelines was detected and therefore the impersonation accounts will not be deleted.

Get-rich-quick schemes

The Internet, especially social media, is full of get-rich-quick schemes. These scam accounts promise users to make a lot of money in a short period of time with very little effort. All users have to do is install questionable apps on their smartphones and provide personal data or give the apps access to various functions on the device.

Sometimes, users are also lured into potential pyramid schemes, allowing the scammers to gradually get their hands on people’s savings.

In many cases, the advertised apps are infected with malicious code. By granting access to device functions, the scammers gain full control and abuse the device to perform advertising fraud – making the devices a part of a larger botnet.

Users’ personal data, on the other hand, is used for identity theft or sold as data sets on dubious marketplaces.

Free offers with a price

Another example of fraud are supposedly “free” offers, for which users have to deposit their credit card data. These scam accounts promise their followers pretty much everything for free: from nutritional supplements, special diet pills for quick weight loss to unique items for video games.

Even TikTok itself is not exempt from scams. Fraudsters took advantage of the pandemic and used fake accounts called “TikTok Ads Business” or “TikTik Ads Manager” to place ads offering users a $3,000 credit for TikTok For Business.

Similar to get-rich-quick schemes, all personal data including credit card details are misused and also sold on marketplaces.

Low-quality dropshipping products

The last scam we want to take a closer look at is low-quality dropshipping products. Fake accounts offer either supposed products from big brands at a fraction of the price or absolutely overpriced no-name products of poor quality. Remember those ads for massage guns?

In one extreme example, an entire 20-piece cast iron set from Creuset was offered for supposedly only $79.99, even though it normally costs over $1,500.

While dropshipping itself is not necessarily a scam, buyers of products from these fake accounts often do not even receive the product.

Scams on the “For You” page

There are many more scams that take place on social networks and especially increasingly on TikTok. What is special about TikTok, however, is that in the past many such fraudulent videos have found a place on the official “For You” page. The “For You” Page is curated by the TikTok algorithm for each user based on their interests and interactions. It is the second feed available to every user besides the “Following” Page and is a place of trust.

The fact that fraud videos appear in this feed and possibly even go viral should not happen given the size of TikTok. Voices for more moderation by TikTok are getting louder and the network definitely needs to optimize its algorithm and improve the detection of such videos and accounts. In addition, TikTok needs to better verify videos and accounts reported by users.

TikTok’s bot problem is massive

Having dealt with scam on TikTok, we are left with another major area that causes frustration on TikTok and takes money out of advertisers’ pockets: automated bot accounts. Bots themselves can be found on every website on the internet. Today, the majority of all internet traffic consists of automated bot requests (57% due to our own research).

However, with TikTok, two things come together that are explosive: On the one hand, there is a huge supply of companies offering TikTok bots for every imaginable goal. On the other hand, there are countless reports that it is apparently possible to be successful on TikTok with bot traffic and even push videos with fake views to a point where they go viral.

Supply for TikTok Bots is endless

Wherever there is an opportunity to make money through reach, there are tools that allow users to automatically grow their account and increase their audience. We saw Instagram bots rise and fall in the early days, and history is currently repeating itself with TikTok.

In most cases, the bots work as follows:

1. You set the target audience guidelines and your custom filters
2. The bot takes your input to automate everything: likes, comments, following other accounts etc.
3. Through the increased exposure, more people become aware of your account. A small fraction of them are interested in your account and you automatically get new followers.
4. The better you set your parameters in which the bot should act automatically, the higher the chance that you will target the right people and they will follow you.

There are many use cases for TikTok bots:

• Accounts with few followers want to increase their reach
• Scammers want to make their fake accounts look more genuine and trustworthy by having more followers
• Users want to build an account in a very specific niche to sell it afterwards
• Users want to push a particular video of themselves so that it goes viral
• and many more

The supply of TikTok bots is almost endless. There are self-hosted solutions that are installed on your own computer, but there are also “professional” companies that offer their service via the cloud at a very affordable monthly price.