Having turned those with smartphones into incidental photographers, Instagram has cemented its place in the online world with an active 130 million users, all of whom are sharing experiences in low-resolution glory.

However the perceived popularity of a ‘Grammed photo may not hold the likeness to its actual following. In simpler terms, it is possible to fake likes on Instagram.

Yes, the ‘likes’ on that sunset shot could be traced to a far more sinister source than a teenage girl hashtagging her working hours away.

Spam botnets, such as the infamous ‘Zeus’ that came to light in 2007, have infiltrated Instagram, and are being put to task generating false ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ in order to create media buzz over particular companies or individuals on the platform for eventual financial gain.

Millions of infected PC’s are now being controlled from central servers in order to apply automatic ‘likes’ to random Instagram users on behalf of client accounts.

The payoff for the client is this: If you like someone’s photo, you increase your own visibility and improve your likelihood of being followed back by the account that you liked. If you like the photos of 1,000 different accounts, you are likely to get a few hundred follows in return. And there’s the endgame. If you have a large following on any platform, you have the opportunity to sell exposure to that following to a brand. The end result is a following of real people, but few of which have followed you for the material you produce on your own feed.

That is, of course, the long way round. Zeus, initially designed to capture credit card numbers has been tweaked to create faceless followers. Sold in $15 batches of 1,000 on sites like Fiverr and applied to designated accounts. The “social proof” created by an initial groundswell of “followers” is likely to attract a higher percentage of real-world followers than an account would have otherwise enjoyed.

Online marketing consultant Will Mitchell says, “It’s fine to do for the first 100, but I always advise stopping after that.”

Facebook, who bought Instagram for a whopping $1 billion dollars have retaliated by tightening restrictions in order to control the raft of spam infecting their new outlet.

Keep an eye out for our forthcoming analysis on the South African Instagram scene.