Website Name
Instafamous.Pro
Website Type
Instagram Follower Buying Platform
Is Instafamous Pro Fake or Real?
Borderline Fake
Why Is Instafamous.Pro Borderline Fake?
Everyone aspires to be famous. Social media networks provide everyone with the possibility of going viral and becoming famous overnight. For a layman, becoming famous on social media is hard work, requiring a lot of time spent in creating content and nurturing a community. Without extraordinary skills or an exceptional personality, it’s difficult to gain a huge following on social media.
The Truth About Paid Followers
There are many websites, generally referred to as Social Media Marketing (SMM) Panels, which offer followers in exchange for money. They are designed to help people easily gain followers without the need for investing time or showcasing any talent. The major issue with buying followers is that the number of followers is no longer considered a relevant metric to judge the popularity of an account.
Precisely due to the existence of platforms that sell followers, the focus of social media marketing has shifted to improving engagement rates (likes, comments, shares, etc.) rather than amassing a large following. What this means is that buying followers is no longer an effective way to increase your Reach ie. how many people are shown your posts by Instagram’s algorithms.
Since people try to manipulate their profile using unfair means, Instagram constantly checks for sudden spikes in followers and is known to block and even ban accounts that don’t follow their community guidelines.
The reason that engagement metrics are now considered primary is that the companies selling followers have tie-ups with click farms where anyone can sign up to get paid for things like clicking links, posting ads, following accounts and writing reviews. Multiple companies can use the same exchange network. These exchanges consist mainly of individuals from countries in Africa and South-East Asia who are looking to earn money online. For this reason, though they are ‘real accounts’, they don’t actively engage with the accounts they are following. The only reason they are following people is that they have been paid to do so and their wages depend on the number of accounts they follow per day.
However, when thousands of followers are required within a short span, companies are also known to employ an army of bots that utilize accounts solely created for the purpose of increasing follower counts, in addition to hacked accounts of real people. Instagram has gotten better at quickly detecting such accounts and banning them. Therefore, your follower count will take a nosedive as soon as they get caught.
Coming Back to Instafamous.Pro
Instafamous Pro offers plans for buying 100 to 2000 followers between a price range of $4 – $30. They have a policy for replacing any lost followers if the followers decrease within a 30-day window. They also portray their service as safe as your account won’t get banned after using it.
Right from the get-go, Instafamous Pro stress upon the point that they provide real organic followers. It is one of the main hooks that they will provide a following ‘which is interested in following new accounts’. They don’t clearly mention where they are promoting your account, but it’s highly likely that they generate the follows on-demand through click farms and bots.
They also claim to have a money-back guarantee if you are dissatisfied, but there is a caveat in the Terms & Conditions that there is no guarantee about the quality of followers. This seems to be an admission that the follows are going to come from dummy accounts in foreign locations.
There are testimonials given by some Twitter users about the effectiveness of this service. However, two out of the six tweets are no longer available. In one case, the account has been suspended while in the other, the tweet has been deleted. The rest are probably sponsored tweets anyway.
They also highlight their TrustPilot score of 4.8/5 multiple times on the page. At the time of writing this article, the score has reduced to 4.2/5. TrustPilot has added a disclaimer on the page that they recommend caution while availing such services.
Delving deeper into the reviews gives the impression that most of them are not written by genuine customers. It’s not a stretch of the imagination to think that a company which sells social media followers can also arrange for fake positive reviews of themselves.
Most of the reviews are by accounts with no profile picture and just one review, which could mean that they have been created solely to pad out the negative reviews and maintain a positive score. Quite a few of the accounts are clearly fake and have only written 5-star reviews of various businesses. It seems obvious to me that these accounts are controlled by an online reputation management service. One of the accounts has even written reviews about another follower-increasing service.
Reviews which look truly genuine are few and far between, and aren’t as glowing as the rest.
Among the sea of positive reviews are also a number of negative reviews from unhappy customers. Most of them say that they found the followers to be of low-quality and non-sustaining. The company has refused refunds to some of them citing the clause mentioned earlier about the quality of followers. As a positive, they do seem to uphold their follower replacement policy.
Reviews outside of TrustPilot are scarce and the few available are negative. One of them claims that using Instafamous Pro got their account banned. There are multiple positive reviews on Quora by a single account which also promotes another follower-increase service called CheapIGFollowers.com, meaning that the account exists for promotional purposes. I also came across a website dedicated to exposing Instafamous Pro as a scam.
After considering all this information, my conclusion is that Instafamous Pro is borderline fake. They do seem to deliver on the promise of increasing your follower count on Instagram, at least for a short while. On the other hand, some of their claims are disingenuous or misleading.
Claiming that the followers they provide are ‘real’ or ‘high-quality’ is definitely a lie. Follows from click farms and bots don’t translate into real engagement. Instafamous.Pro serves no purpose other than decorating your profile.
Most of the reviews look fake and using the service is not as safe as they make it out to be. The threat of losing your account is very real if your followers suddenly increase by hundreds or thousands, as Instagram can easily detect this kind of activity. The service won’t help you boost your business or personal brand in any way and only exists for vanity.
If you have been the victim of a social media scam, you can take the following steps:
- File a complaint with the payment portal and ask whether the payment can be reversed.
- Leave a negative review on review portals such as Scamadviser and TrustPilot
- Report the website to Google using the Suspicious Site Reporter extension for Chrome
- Give a low rating to the website on Web of Trust. You can also install their extension for the same.
How to Get Your Money Back from a Scam
Remember: If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Disclaimer: This review is intended for information only and should not be relied on when making financial or business decisions. If you are a website owner and would like to provide clarifications regarding your business and/or website, please get in touch using the Contact Form.