I build a social platform, which means I spend an unreasonable amount of time studying the thing I'm trying to replace: the fake internet.
After months of staring at it, I've stopped seeing random noise and started seeing a surprisingly organized ecosystem — with distinct species, predictable behaviors, and tell-tale markings. So here's the field guide I wish someone had handed me. Every major species of fake, categorized, with how to spot each one.
Bookmark it. Send it to the relative who keeps almost falling for things.
Class 1 — Scams
🪙 Investment / crypto
The call: an unsolicited DM — "I turned $500 into $12,000, want me to show you how?" At 2am. For free. Out of pure generosity.
Markings: rented-lambo profile pic, fake urgency, "guaranteed" anything, and a hard push to move you off-platform to Telegram or WhatsApp.
💔 *Romance / pig-butchering
*
The call: a too-perfect stranger falls for you fast, love-bombs, and eventually needs money — for a flight, a customs fee, or a "great opportunity" they want to share with you. (When romance and crypto combine, that's pig-butchering — the fastest-growing scam class online.)
Markings: never available to video call, timeline moves suspiciously fast, and every plot twist somehow ends at your wallet.
📢 Advertisement
The call: a deepfaked celebrity personally begging you to buy $19 crypto-skincare, or 90%-off sunglasses with a countdown timer.
Markings: typos, cloned logos, a "celebrity" who has no idea they're in the ad, and a price too good to be real.
🛒 Shopping
The call: a store with 4.9 stars and 10,000 reviews that ships a napkin — or nothing — and stops existing three weeks later.
Markings: brand-new domain, reviews all dated the same week, absurd discounts, card-only checkout, no real contact info.
🏬 Fake storefronts
The call: a cute little boutique that's been "closing down 🥺 everything must go" for two years, or a DM-to-buy shop that takes your payment and the whole account with it.
Markings: stolen product photos (reverse-image-search them), payment via DM or bank transfer, and a support channel that ghosts the second money lands.
Class 2 — Bots
📩 DM bots
Instant "hey! 😊" within 0.3 seconds of a follow. "Your account has been flagged, click here to verify." Endless crypto and "check my page" links.
Tell: the speed. No human replies that fast, that generically, that often.
💬 Comment bots
"Nice post 🔥 check my profile" under a photo of nothing. Generic "Amazing 😍❤️" on everything. Bots replying to other bots and holding entire conversations in your comments.
Tell: a username that's a first name plus four random digits.
👻 *Ghost / like-follow bots
*
Likes and follows from accounts with no profile picture, no posts, and a name like Anna_love_9928. Follow-then-unfollow churn at dawn.
Tell: engagement with zero footprint behind it.
Class 3 — Fake accounts
The raw material. Every class above runs on them — mass-registered identities, spun up thousands at a time for the price of a coffee.
Markings: no history, stock or stolen profile photo, auto-generated username, and a follower count that's either zero or suspiciously, purchasably round.
Class 4 — Farming
📈 Follower farming
Bought followers, follow-pods, "growth services." The account with 100,000 followers and nine likes.
Tell: the math never maths. Big number, dead engagement.
🔁 Engagement farming
"Comment AMEN or you don't love your mother." Ragebait engineered to make you angry-comment. "99% of people will scroll past this." Fake giveaways. Stolen viral reposts.
Tell: the post's only goal is to make you react — it isn't actually trying to say anything.
The one thing every species shares
Zoom out, and all of it depends on a single resource: cheap, disposable identity.
You can't be sure who's real, so fakeness is cheap to manufacture and expensive to catch. Bots need throwaway accounts. Farms need throwaway accounts. Most scams need throwaway accounts. Remove the disposability of identity, and most of this ecosystem loses the ground it stands on.
That's not a moderation problem you patch after the fact. It's a foundation problem.
Why I'm cataloguing all this
I'm building rarelm — a social platform with one hard rule: every account is a verified real human. No throwaways, so no bot armies, no farms, no hit-and-run cons. (I wrote up the engineering side of that — verification-at-the-foundation vs. detect-after-the-fact — as a separate deep-dive, if that's your thing.)
I'm pre-seed, building mostly in public, and if you're an engineer who finds adversarial/identity problems fun — my DMs are open (to the real ones 🧡).
Your turn
Which species hits your feed hardest? Which did I miss — because I know I missed some, and I'm still cataloguing.
Drop it in the comments.
Real Is Rare. Let's make it less rare :- https://www.rarelm.com
— Ashutosh Kesharwani, founder, rarelm
Top comments (0)