The Instagram Scam You Should Know About

Instagram giveaways are really popular because many creators can use them to increase engagement and show appreciation to their fans.

This has created a scammy secondary giveaway contest commonly referred to as a loop giveaway. In these giveaways, a famous influencer posts that they are giving away a few consumer items, generally an Apple product, a luxury purse, or cash. The influencer asks you to like their post, tag their three closest friends in a comment, and go follow 80+ people on a different account.

There are numerous reasons why this is scammy.

Reason 1: Buying followers and fake engagement is against Instagram’s Terms of Use. This scheme is indirectly paying for followers by dancing around the rules. The algorithms of these social media apps have always had a way of punishing bad behavior like paying for engagement.

Number 2: I have no idea how the winners are supposed to verify that they followed every single one of the sponsored accounts.

Number 3: Everything goes according to plan. You pay $4,000 to be a sponsor in the Bobby Schmurda giveaway. You just added 20,000 or more followers to your account. Everything is great. These are all paying fans, right? Not exactly.

Number 4: This entire scheme ruins many people’s experience on Instagram. If you participate in just a couple of these giveaways where you follow 50 or more accounts, your entire feed is going to be random people who you don’t know or don’t organically follow.

Number 5: What the main sponsors will do in these giveaways is unfollow all of the accounts that they were following right before the deadline leaving you with an inability to unfollow those random accounts.

In the video, I provide an example of why loop giveaways are terrible for your brand and why people shouldn't invest in these get-followers-fast schemes. I also show an example of a couple creators running a loop giveaway for a car and Instagram specifically stating that these kinds of giveaways are not the content they want to see on the platform.

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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Car Giveaway
0:25 - G Herbo Giveaway
1:50 - Breakdown of Loop Giveaway
5:05 - Finances of Loop Giveaway
6:00 - Why This Giveaway is Scammy
8:07 - Value of Organic Growth
9:07 - Fake Follower Fallacy
10:07 - Fake Followers Impact on Brands
11:12 - Why Loop Giveaways Are Bad for Creators
12:29 - Winning Giveaways Comes at a Cost
13:19 - Instagram is Awful