New accounts with very similar names and that ensure they know everything about your life are constantly springing up on the social network. Will it be true?
On Instagram, a new fashion is spreading: tagging in their Stories profiles that have a very similar name and that vary only by the upper or lower case letters or the presence of alphanumeric symbols (the dot, the comma, the underscore). The name of these profiles is “I know everything about you” and they assure to reveal personal information.
Two journalists of the newspaper la Repubblica, intrigued by the high number of followers of these profiles, wanted to deepen the theme. And they discovered that it is actually a scam. And that it affects especially the youngest. After creating a fake profile, the two journalists followed the procedure to get a response from one of the Instagram profiles, but the response never arrived. What would be the purpose of this scam? To increase the number of fans of the profile so they can use it in the future for other purposes or sell it back to advertising agencies.
How the “I know everything about you” account scam works
With the promise of revealing some intimate information, accounts such as “I.I know.Everything”; “I_know_all_about_you_official”; “I_know_everything”; “I__so::everything__” have reached thousands of followers and are being tagged by teens in Stories on Instagram. Why? Because it is one of the steps to follow for the Instagram profile to reveal something about your private life. The procedure to follow to receive intimate information about your life is very simple and present in the bios of the accounts: first you have to follow the account, tag him in a Story, send him a message saying tell me and wait for the response. And to prove that this is not a scam, in the bulletin board there are screenshots with the answers given to other users. But, in all likelihood, these are simply friends who have lent themselves to the game.
Following the example of “I know all about you”, local pages were also born, such as “iosotuttodibergamo” or “io.so.tutto.montecatini”. And there are also other pages that offer a variation on the theme such as “iosochitivuole”, “io_so_chi_ti_ama”; “svelochitiama”.
All the screenshots inside these profiles have one thing in common: most of the messages are sent by boys between 14 and 22 years old. An age range that is very tempting for advertising agencies and companies that are looking for profiles with a high number of followers where they can sponsor their products.
Why were the “I know all about you” profiles created
According to the two journalists of la Repubblica, the pages were created to collect the highest possible number of followers and to be sold to communication agencies for “influencer marketing” campaigns. Profiles are renamed and users who had started to follow them are bombarded by advertising. This is not a real scam, but certainly an unfair practice. And in some cases the huge growth of profiles in a few days could mean that in reality the followers are fake. There are online services that “sell” packages of followers: with just a little more than one hundred euros you can have thousands of followers in a few hours.
Do you get a response?
From the screenshots on the profiles’ walls it would seem that users get genuine responses. But the number of examples is so low that it could also be a simple artfully created hoax. As reported by the two journalists of la Repubblica, their attempt was unsuccessful and although they followed the procedure they never received an answer.