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December 11th, 2017 
Awake Goy Firms like Devumi have to maintain large herds of accounts in order not to be too badly affected when some of their roster fall foul of Twitter’s anti-bot algorithms – the recent fate of @VaieenCaarp and @PlgsandPints. As a result, there is a flourishing market for bulk accounts. Bio (and bio language), profile image, phone verification, number of tweets, account set-up date, regularity of tweets and number of followers are all factors in the cost of an account. Older accounts and those with a more detailed history of interactions are more expensive. Newer accounts – especially those lacking profile pictures, known as “eggs” in Twitter parlance – are cheap.
A glance at one of the foremost account marketplaces gives an idea of the variety of services available. Users of the Black Hat World social media forum (“If you gotta ask – you’re in the wrong place”) buy and sell email, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Youtube, Instagram and many other accounts on a daily basis. Accounts can be “aged”, “phone verified”, “with Real followers” or tailored to other specifications.
A recent advert has Facebook accounts ranging from 50 cents (new, non-phone-verified) to $6 (one to two years old, phone verified) each; one to two-year-old phone verified Twitter accounts sell for $2 each with newer ones at 60 cents. Sellers also offer tools for bulk account creation, remote SMS verification, commenting and upvoting services, “viral content finders” and complete marketing packages like the “Twitter Money Bot” which scrapes tweets, bios and pictures then follows and unfollows, retweets, likes and generates replies.
Miller, the founder of buytwitterfollowersfast.com, was candid about how the industry ticks. “If there’s a seller out there who’s claiming that his followers are real, he’s lying. Think about it, you can’t expect to get 500 real Twitter followers for just $7, that’s just not doable.”
Some firms take a different line. A representative of Socialsbox – who did not give a name but agreed to a Skype chat – told the Bureau that the company was “using more legitimate way of increasing retweets then just freshly created accounts”. “All accounts belong to someone,” the representative said, explaining that a sort of exchange system operated whereby people followed and retweeted others “to earn credit which later on can be used to gain same service.”
To create a large number of bots, it helps to have a large number of email accounts. Jim Vidmar, the Vegas-based marketing expert, explained that this can be achieved through Russian mailservers like mail.ru or inbox.ru, which are “very liberal” – that is, they don’t mind how many email addresses you create. You can then use these addresses to verify your Twitter accounts.
Bulk Twitter accounts are plentiful, and users are picky. “Account quality is not great,” complained one Black Hat World user about an order he had placed. “These are obviously fake accounts … The issue was the username, very similar to @fh34odbh303n.”
Vidmar takes care to “brew”, as he puts it, the accounts which he buys. “I don’t want Russian eggs.” Brewing the accounts – setting up a profile picture, a bio, following some people and making a few tweets – can take “weeks and you need to be fluent in multiple bits of software”. Nonetheless, when operating on a bulk scale, “you can’t make bots totally different from each other. They have to have similarities.”
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