Crowdfunding and platform manipulation
Posts on X linking to Gofundme and other crowdfunding platforms are frequently amplified by groups of inauthentic accounts
If you scroll through posts on X (formerly Twitter) that contain links to Gofundme or other crowdfunding platforms and take a gander at the engagement, you’ll notice that fundraiser posts are frequently reposted by multiple similar-looking accounts that describe themselves as “crowdfunding experts” or something of the sort. Many of these accounts are recent creations and have little or no content outside of reposts and replies promoting crowdfunding posts. These accounts often show other signs of inauthenticity as well, such as the use of plagiarized profile photos. It is presently unclear to what extent this inauthentic engagement is actually desired by any of the people who post the fundraisers that the spam accounts amplify.
Studying inauthentic activity on X is a somewhat more cumbersome endeavor than it once was, due to the removal of API access for researchers. Nevertheless, through a combination of manual exploration and creative utilization of tools such as Nitter instances, some degree of data gathering does remain feasible. Exploration of the engagement on recent X posts with Gofundme links yielded a set of 59 crowdfunding spam accounts, with creation dates ranging from April to November 2023. Many of them have no content whatsoever other than reposts of various fundraisers; some also spam repetitive replies advertising their spammy services.
Not all of the spam accounts have crowdfunding-themed biographies. Several, including @DoctorPete53295, @LeahRank96657, @Nursegrace01. and @Williams912292 portray themselves as members of the medical profession. (The latter even claims to have his own hospital in the “United State”.) Others portray themselves as teachers or clergy. Regardless of their alleged careers, all of these accounts primarily post crowdfunding spam.
As is often the case with social media spam accounts, many of the crowdfunding spam accounts use plagiarized photos as their avatars. This is true of both the accounts that describe themselves as “crowdfunding experts” and those that claim to be teachers, healthcare workers, or pastors. TinEye reverse image search proved highly effective at identifying the use of stolen images by these accounts; Google and Yandex performed more poorly.
The crowdfunding platform most frequently amplified by these spam accounts is Gofundme, with 50610 reposts. In second place is IndieGogo with 1092 reposts followed by Kickstarter with 817. (Note that this is possibly the result of bias in the data gathering process, which began with exploring the amplification of recent Gofundme posts; seeding the process with posts linking a different crowdfunding site might yield a different group of spam accounts and a different distribution of sites linked.)
As mentioned earlier in this article, some of the crowdfunding spam accounts don’t just repost fundraisers; they also reply. These replies are highly repetitive and are generally advertisements for the “promotion” services provided by the spam accounts (i.e. “Hello, I am here to help you to promote your campaign to real and targeted audience for you to have the high chance of getting donations from them. You can follow me back to discuss better on how your campaign will be promoted to real Potential Donors.”).
Although the exact degree of coordination between the various spam accounts is unclear, they do often end up reposting the same posts. The degree of overlap varies somewhat and certain pairs of accounts, such as @crowdvista41932 and @CFundpro18096, @ChampCrowd27532 and @Ayo1459154, and @SylviaLatt42722 and @lorraine_m39640, repost a more similar lineup of fundraisers than others. It is relatively rare for any given fundraiser post to receive exactly one repost from a spam account; generally, if any of the spammers interact with a post, several more follow suit in short order.
As a final interesting note, one of the spam accounts renamed itself while I was writing this article. The account with permanent ID 1703770566107295744, which had the handle @successpro22304 as of the evening of November 2nd, is now named @Thomas_A022.
As an aside it night be interesting to see if aby of them actually worked for those that paid them to crowdfund for them.