Snapchat is great for communicating with friends and family,

 but did you know it’s also a popular platform for so-called “influencers” to get new followers? 

When they get enough followers, Snapchat pays them!

 But if someone has more than 10 million followers on Snapchat,

how do they keep getting millions of new followers every day?

Turns out that influencers are using sneaky tactics like bots or “follow-bots” to grow their following.

 And the clever marketers behind these schemes are able to pump up their follower count by millions in just a few hours.

How does a follow-bot work? It’s a little secret that some of the biggest influencers use. 

Follow-bots are shortcodes that tell a program to put your account on auto-follow mode. 

When another person follows the bot, it comes with dozens or even hundreds of followers from other “real people.”

 If you ask for advice on Snapchat, you could be getting advice from a screen-name of someone who doesn’t even exist!

 But, if it’s someone with a lot of followers already 

 then they have no problem telling you what to do. In fact, it’s incredibly tempting.

If you follow an influencer on Snapchat, make sure they don’t have a follow-bot. 

If you see a bunch of brand mentions or if someone is trying to get you to buy something from their website,

 that person is most likely spamming their followers for more followers.

The FTC has been monitoring social media and Instagram in particular for a while,

 but they’re still catching people who are popping up in our feeds with insanely high follower counts.

 In fact, the FTC has caught more than 500 scam influencers on Instagram this year alone!

Snapchat isn’t the only one…

I noticed recently that a bunch of Instagram influencers were going on about a monthly subscription box for clothing. 

You know the ones 

 a box of clothing tailored for you where you can check out various items and vote on what you think would look best on you? 

What these people didn’t tell their followers was that the box is usually from China.

 The clothes are poorly made and generally don’t look half as nice as they do in these videos posted to Instagram. 

The clothes are literally swiped across a model to show how they look on a human being. 

In fact, I looked at the Instagram profile of one of the influencers, 

 she literally had been posting about this clothing subscription service from China once a day for a month.

The first popular blogger that got me into fashion was Lauren Conrad from The Hills. 

She made popular the term bubblegum pink, but her fashion sense really wasn’t anything special.

 She just wore clothes that could be found in the Forever 21 Clearance Section and tried to pass them off as something unique and hard to find.

I think I liked Lauren because she was so relatable.

We all have our flaws, but her were very easy to see.

One time someone sent me an email about a clothing subscription service, 

 I looked at it for a minute without really paying attention.

 It was just another box of clothes that people were trying to sell on the internet. 

But then I saw that they had sent me a link to subscribe… for $1,200! 

That’s right

 if you want something custom made for you in China,

 you can subscribe to this service and receive your shipment every month for $$$1,200

I started doing some research on these companies myself.

I found that most of these services were from China.

They would take your measurements and after a few weeks, you would get a box of clothes in the mail.

I looked at a few of the clothing subscription box websites, and they all have free trials so you can try it before you buy it. 

There were several products being sold on these websites that weren’t even IN their online store!

 They had a huge variety of products for both men and women, so I thought I’d do a little research. 

Dozens of products were listed on their websites that didn’t even exist! 

There wasn’t an option to buy them at all – they were just there to make the website look more legitimate.

When I clicked on the free trial button,

 I was taken to a third party website where they try to sell you the box.

I click to sign up for a free trial and am asked for my credit card information.

 When I was asked for a billing address, it would not accept any of the addresses that I put in there. 

I tried this with at least 4 different addresses that I have used before during other online purchases.

 Unfortunately, these products were being sold through a “partner” website 

 none of the billing information from my bank could be saved.

The “free trial” is not really free if you can’t give them your billing information.

And then I noticed that on the Facebook pages for these subscription service websites, 

they all had the same exact comments.

I started to wonder why there were so many people commenting, “It’s really not worth it” or 

“Thank you for sharing this!” when they hadn’t even shared anything yet.

Now, I am not usually one to jump on board with herbal supplements and weight loss pills,

 but I thought why not give it a shot. It’s only $1.