How to check fake followers on Instagram before influencer collab

Q: How do IQFluence spot fake followers?

IQFluence analyzes a creator’s audience mix (real people, mass followers, suspicious accounts), growth history, and engagement patterns to flag low-quality segments. Think of it as an automated fake followers audit that looks at who follows, who actually engages, and whether those patterns make sense for a real audience.

Q: Why should I check for fake followers on my Instagram profile?

Because fake followers inflate your numbers and quietly trash your performance. If a big chunk of fake followers on Instagram never sees, clicks, or buys, your CPM, CPC, and CPA are all lying — which makes you look inefficient next to other channels.

Q: Should I work with influencers who have fake followers?

A small percentage is normal; 0% is unrealistic. What matters is the ratio: under ~10–15% is usually workable, 20–30% needs a price cut and a small test, and anything beyond that is a “probably not” unless they’re a celebrity with proven sales.

Q: Who has the most fake followers on Instagram?

It changes constantly, and every study ranks different celebrities and mega-influencers at the top. Instead of chasing “hall of shame” lists, it’s smarter to run your own checks on any creator you’d actually pay and treat big followings as higher-risk by default.

Q: How do Fake Followers Impact ROI?

They shrink your real reach, so your effective CPM and CPA shoot up. If you pay for 500K “reach” and 30% of that audience is junk, you’re really paying enterprise prices to talk to ~350K people — a simple fake followers Instagram check makes that visible before Finance does.

Q: What actions should I take after identifying fake accounts?

For creators you’re evaluating, downgrade their score, renegotiate rates, or cut them from the shortlist entirely. For your own brand account, remove obvious spam, tighten targeting, and schedule a regular “check fake followers Instagram” review so audience quality becomes an ongoing KPI, not a one-time clean-up.

November 26, 2025 · 12:26

Content Marketing Expert

Anastasiia Sukhareva

Your budget’s on the line, your boss loves this creator, and your gut is whispering: what if half their audience is fake? You’re not paranoid — nearly 49% of Instagram influencers have used fake followers at some point. That’s bots, spam accounts, mass-followers — exactly the kind of “audience” that drains your budget and leaves you with zero return.

The cost? Inflated CPMs. Broken benchmarks. And a campaign report that’s impossible to explain to your CMO or client. Brands have already lost over $1.3 billion to influencer fraud.

So how to check fake followers on Instagram before you sign the deal?
What clues in their growth, engagement, or audience data scream red flag?
And what’s a normal amount of risk vs a reason to run?

That’s what we’re covering in this article — step by step, inside IQFluence.

But first, let’s check if we’re on the same page about the fake followers definition.

Find real creators, run a full fake-follower audit, and track campaign results by country, city, and language — all inside IQFluence.

Try it for free

What are fake followers?

Fake followers are the people sitting in an influencer’s audience who make your reach slide look impressive and your results slide painfully empty. From a marketer’s point of view, they’re any “followers” who can’t realistically see, care about, or act on your content — no matter how gorgeous the feed is.

That’s what we mean when we talk about fake Instagram followers.

Some of them are easy to check fake followers Instagram:

You’ve got the obvious bots: no profile photo, nonsense handles like @user28492018, zero posts, following 2,000 people and “engaging” with nothing.
Then there are the mass-purchased accounts that show up when a creator’s follower line suddenly jumps for no good reason. No viral video, no big collab, just a weird spike and a bunch of new followers from random countries that don’t match their usual audience.
Next, you’ve got the inactive or “dead” profiles. These might have real photos and a handful of posts… but they haven’t liked or commented on anything in years. They pad follower count, but they don’t move a single metric you report on.
And finally, the sneakiest group: giveaway-only followers. They follow for iPhones, gift cards, and skincare bundles — not because they care about the creator’s niche. The second the prizes stop, so does their attention.

Why does this matter? Because fraud isn’t a rounding error anymore. CHEQ and the University of Baltimore estimated fake followers would cost advertisers $1.3B in 2019 alone. And today, based on IQFLuence inner stats, 30% of Instagram influencers have fake or suspicious followers.

So when you pay for “500K reach,” a big slice of that pie can be bots, ghosts, and prize hunters. Say you drop $10K on that collab: on paper your CPM is $20. But if ~30% of that audience is fake, your real reach is closer to 350K — which means your effective CPM jumps to about $28.50 and roughly $3,000 of your budget never even had a chance to convert.

What’s an acceptable fake follower rate, and when is it a red flag?

There isn’t one universal magic number, but most fraud-detection tools and agencies land in the same ballpark:

Influencer Hero calls ~5% fake followers “normal noise” and says 20–25%+ is a red flag that hurts ROI. influencer-hero.com
IZEA gives almost the same range: 5% is workable, 25%+ = “bad investment” territory. IZEA Worldwide, Inc
SARAL treats 5–15% fake as acceptable and auto-excludes creators with 30%+ fake followers from searches. getsaral.com
Upfluence recommends working with influencers who have 80%+ real followers (so ≤20% fake). Upfluence

Now let’s turn that into something you can actually use by platform and creator tier.

Most third-party tools see Instagram as the platform with the longest history of influencer fraud. HypeAuditor found that around half of Instagram influencers showed signs of fraud in 2021. HypeAuditor.com

A practical way to read that:

Nano & micro creators (1K–100K followers)

🟢 Aim for: ≤10–15% fake.

🟡 Yellow zone: 15–25% – only proceed if everything else (engagement, audience fit) is strong.

🔴 Red flag: >25% fake – you’re likely overpaying for vanity.

Macro & mega creators (250K–1M+ followers)

🟢 Bigger accounts naturally pick up more bots and dead weight over time. Collabstr’s scans show some celebrities sitting at ~28% fake followers. Collabstr

🟡 Aim for: ≤20–25% fake on big names.

🔴 Red flag: 30%+ fake plus weak engagement = your money is better elsewhere.

Use your tool’s fake Instagram followers check as a sanity gate before you even bother with pricing.

How to turn this into brand rules

Here’s the boring-but-essential part: write this down as policy. Don’t keep it in your head. For example, you might set:

Platform-specific max fake %

Instagram & TikTok nanos/micros: aim for ≤15% fake, very rarely approve >20%.
YouTube channels: stay under 20% fake unless there’s exceptional proof of performance.

Creator-size exceptions. Celebrities and legacy creators often carry more legacy bots. If everything else (ER, comments, conversions) screams “this works,” you might allow up to mid-20s% fake — but you document why.
Process, not vibes. Every creator goes through the same Instagram fake followers check (or TikTok/YouTube equivalent). If they break your threshold, you either negotiate hard on price or you move on. No exceptions because “the founder likes them.”

That way, when the CMO asks, “Why did we pick this influencer?”, you’re not waving at a pretty feed. You’re showing a clear, written rulebook — and the numbers to back it up.

Now time for practice: there are two methods of how to tell if someone has fake followers 👇

Method 1: Filter out high-risk creators at the discovery stage

Let’s say you at the stage when you only know who you’re hunting for on Instagram:

10–50K followers. Mostly women 25–34 in the U.S. Content about skincare, not side hustles and crypto. At least 5% engagement so your CPM doesn’t make Finance faint.
And, crucially, you want that audience as clean as possible.

Now imagine dropping those criteria into a generic search tool. You get 1,500 creators back. Cute… until you realise someone on your team will have to click into every profile, guess whether the followers look real, and then defend those guesses in a budget meeting.

In IQFluence Discovery, this is where you get very specific, very fast. You set:

Then you add the real gatekeeper: the max fake follower percentage you’re willing to accept, say “up to 15%.” In practice, this turns your discovery search into an automated fake followers audit instead of a random scroll.

Without that filter, you’d have to do this check with screenshots and spreadsheets. The filter doesn’t replace learning how to detect fake Instagram followers, but it quietly removes the worst offenders before anyone falls in love with their aesthetics or Reels hooks.

You’ll still run a deep-dive later to see how to find out if Instagram followers are fake at a post and audience level — but you’ll be doing it on 231 solid, pre-cleaned candidates instead of 4923 wildcards.

Method 2: Deep-dive into an influencer profile for fake followers

So now you’re past the “spray and pray” stage. You’ve run your search, filtered by platform, country, ER, fake follower threshold, and you’re staring at a shortlist of, say, 10 promising creators. They all look good in Discovery. You don’t have the budget to test them all.

This is where you stop scrolling and start thinking like an auditor.

Method 2 is about slowing down and asking, one profile at a time: “Does this audience behave like real humans who discovered this creator over time… or like numbers that were pumped up to impress brands?”

We start with the thing most marketers skip: growth.

Start with growth: did this audience grow like a real one?

How to check if someone's followers are fake based on the followers growth: Open the Followers growth section in IQFluence. You’ll see two stories sitting right there in graph form:

Audience analysis in IQFluence. Sign up to test it for 7-days free.

A curve that shows total followers growth during last month – all the little spikes and dips.

Your job is to read those lines like a timeline.

Healthy growth looks a bit boring, honestly. A slow, steady climb. A few bumps when something big happens – a viral Reel, a brand collab that pops, a giveaway that’s clearly promoted in their content. You can line those spikes up with real posts and go, “Yep, that makes sense.”

Shady growth looks… loud. Vertical jumps out of nowhere. Plateaus followed by instant +10K cliffs. No new content. No campaign. No explanation other than “someone just bought a chunk of the audience.

Think: a creator sitting at 20K for months who suddenly leaps to 35K in three days while posting nothing new. That’s not momentum. That’s manufacturing.

Check the engagement spread: do their posts actually move people?

Now that growth looks at least semi-sane, zoom into how each post performs.

In IQFluence, open the engagement/performance graph for the last 20–30 posts. One axis is the posts (usually in order), the other is performance — views or engagement rate. You’re not hunting for “a good average.” You’re reading the pattern.

Audience analysis in IQFluence. Sign up to test it for 7-days free.

On a healthy account, most dots sit in a similar band. Maybe their Reels hover around 5–7% ER, with a few posts punching up to 10–12% when they really nail the topic. That’s what you want: a stable floor, plus a couple of winners.

Suspicious looks like this: one or two posts at 12–15% ER (giveaways, loops, huge prize), and a long tail of posts under 1–1.5%. Contests explode. Normal content flatlines. If 70–80% of their recent posts underperform their own average, you’re not looking at a loyal audience, you’re looking at opportunists.

Now split organic vs #ad. If “day in my life” posts sit at 6% ER but every branded post limps along at 0.8–1%, your product is likely headed for the same graveyard.

When a stakeholder asks how to detect fake followers on Instagram, this is the screen you show: “See how they only wake up for prizes? That’s who we’d be paying for.”

Decode audience quality: who are these people really?

Okay, growth looks reasonable. Engagement isn’t a total graveyard. Next question: who is actually sitting in this audience?

Open the audience type breakdown in IQFluence. That little pie chart is your X-ray. You’ll usually see four slices:

Real people – normal users. Posts, photos, friends. This is your core. You want this slice big.
Mass followers – people following hundreds or thousands of accounts. Their feed is chaos; their attention is thin.
Influencers – other creators. Great in moderation, but if they dominate the pie, you’re basically paying to impress peers, not buyers.
Suspicious accounts – weird patterns, low-quality profiles. This is your siren-red slice.

Now read the mix, not just one slice.

A creator with 70% real, 20% mass followers, 5% influencers, 5% suspicious? That’s workable. You’ll still sanity-check other signals, but the base is there.

Another creator with the same follower count… yet their pie is 35% real, 45% mass followers, 5% influencers, 15% suspicious? That smells like bought followers, loops, and junk traffic. One of the simplest ways to show a stakeholder how to identify fake followers on Instagram is to put those two pies side by side and ask, “Which audience would you bet your budget on?”

Sanity-check geo and language: do they even reach your market?

Okay, so growth looks human and the audience mix isn’t screaming “bot farm.”

Next filter: even if these people are real… can they ever buy from you?

Open the audience locations and languages in IQFluence and get ruthless:

Check top countries and cities
Check main audience language(s)
Compare both to:

Where the creator says they’re based.
The language they actually use in Reels, Stories, and captions.
Your target markets.

Now put numbers on it.

For example, If you’re a U.S.-only DTC brand and only 25–30% of influencers audience is in the U.S., that means 70–75% of impressions can’t convert. Drop $10K on that collab and at least $7K is effectively unspendable from a revenue point of view.

CPM might look fine; ROI won’t.

Same with language: if every post is in Spanish, but half the audience is tagged as speaking something else, they probably didn’t grow through content. They grew through shoutouts, loops, or paid traffic in random regions. That’s not “reach,” that’s noise.

You’re aiming for a simple rule of thumb (based on IQFLuence experience results):

For core markets, you want 50–70%+ of the audience in your key countries/regions.
Anything below 30–40% in your main market goes into “only if the rate is insanely good” territory.

When your CMO asks how to tell if someone has fake followers, this is an easy slide: creator claims “London-based UK beauty,” but only 18% of their audience is in the UK and 55% sits in countries you will never ship to. You don’t need a long speech. You just say:

“We’d be paying UK rates to talk to a non-UK audience. We’re passing.”

Compare organic vs sponsored posts: do ads flop while everything else flies?

This is the moment of truth. Not “do people like this creator?” but “do they still care when a brand shows up?”

Head to the Posts section in IQFluence and mentally label every post:

Sponsored: #ad, #sponsored, “paid partnership with…”, brand tags in the first line.
Organic: everything else — routines, rants, memes, “day in my life” reels.

Now pull the numbers, not just vibes.

Look at the last 10–20 posts and write down, even roughly:

Average ER for organic posts (likes + comments ÷ followers).
Average ER for sponsored posts.
Average views for organic vs branded Reels.

Here’s a simple rule of thumb I’d actually put in a deck:

If organic posts sit around 4–6% ER (which is solid for micro creators) and branded content stays above 2–3%, you’re in a healthy range.
If organic sits at 5–7% and every sponsored post crashes to <1% ER or pulls 50–70% fewer views, that’s a red flag. The audience is there for personality, not products — or a chunk of them were never real buyers to begin with.

Layer comment quality on top:

“Love this, where did you get it?” and “Does it work on oily skin?” = intent.
“Cute 😍” copy-pasted under every #ad = background noise.

When your CMO asks how to check for fake followers on Instagram in a way that actually ties to revenue, this is the slide you want: one column for organic ER/views, one for sponsored, plus a simple takeaway like:

“Brand posts perform at ~20–40% below organic = normal.
Brand posts perform at ~80–90% below organic = we’re likely paying for the wrong audience.”

Open a few posts and read the comments like a human

This is the sanity check that saves you from pretty-but-pointless audiences.

From the Posts list in IQFluence, open 4–6 recent posts:

2–3 organic (day-in-the-life, tips, memes)
2–3 sponsored (#ad, “so excited to partner with…”)

Now give yourself 60 seconds per post and run a quick, numbers-backed gut check.

1️⃣ Count “real” vs “filler” comments

Scan the first 30–50 comments and roughly split them into:

Real: questions, opinions, inside jokes, tagged friends with context “Does this work on acne-prone skin?” or “@sarah this is the serum I told you about”.
Filler: “Nice pic”, “So cute”, random emojis, “follow back”, copy-paste phrases.

If fewer than 20–30% of the comments are “real,” that post is mostly noise. One post like that is fine. If it’s true for most posts, your conversions will suffer.

2️⃣ Look at unique commenters

Rough rule: for a post with 100+ comments, you want at least 60–70 unique names. If you keep seeing the same 10–15 accounts under everything, that’s a tiny core trying to make the party look crowded.

3️⃣ Check language + topic mismatch

Caption in English, but half the comments in a completely unrelated language.
Tutorial with 40K views and… zero actual questions, just 🔥🔥🔥.

That usually means people aren’t really processing the content. They’re scrolling, dropping emojis, and moving on.

When you stack this on top of growth, audience type, and geo, comments become the “last mile” proof:

Strong meaningful-comment ratio = real people paying attention.
Wall-to-wall emojis and copy-paste fluff = people, or bots, just passing through.

Fake follower checklist for your influencer marketing campaign

You don’t need a 20-page framework every time you vet a creator. You need a fast, repeatable gut-check you can run in five minutes and hand to your team so everyone follows the same rules.

Use this checklist as your mini “fake follower audit” before you send a brief, request a media kit, or even think about negotiating a rate.

How IQFluence simplifies your influencer marketing

Imagine having one place where you can find the right creators, prove their audience is real, and see exactly what your campaigns did in New York vs Madrid vs São Paulo… without 14 spreadsheets and 27 screenshots.

That’s IQFluence.

It’s an AI-powered influencer marketing platform for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, built for brand marketers and agencies who are done guessing. Yes, it helps you do fake Instagram followers check in seconds.

But it also does the unsexy, business-critical stuff: clean discovery, deep audience intel, campaign performance broken down by country, city, and language so you can defend every dollar you spend.

Here’s what you get in one place:

✅ Influencer Discovery (16+ smart filters + AI search). Search creators by platform, follower range, audience country and city, language, age, gender, engagement rate, category, posting activity – and even set a max fake follower %.

Want “US skincare creators on IG with 10–50K followers, 5–10% ER, and <15% suspicious audience”? That’s one search, not three tools.

✅ Influencer Analysis. Open any creator and see:

Growth history and posting consistency.
Audience type breakdown (real people vs mass followers vs suspicious accounts).
Top countries, cities, and languages.
Content performance: views, likes, comments, saves, shares, engagement rate
So you’re not just asking “do I like their vibe?” — you’re asking “does their audience look like my buyer?”

✅ Audience Overlap Analysis. Compare influencers to each other (and to your brand) to see:

How much their audiences overlap.
Where they’re strong: regions, languages, interests.

This is how you stop paying three creators to scream at the same 80% of people and start building true incremental reach.

✅ Influencer Campaign Reporting & Analysis (down to city & language). Plug in your posts or tracking links and IQFluence pulls campaign metrics into one dashboard. Depending on what you track, you can see:

Impressions, views, likes, comments, saves, shares.
Clicks, registrations, purchases and other actions tied to each post or creator.
Cost, CPC, CPA, or custom KPIs.

And the real magic for CMOs? You slice it all by audience location and language.
“This TikTok creator drove 65% of clicks from Mexico City and Bogotá, Spanish UI, Android devices.” “These two IG collabs looked similar on surface metrics, but the one with more UK city traffic actually delivered 2x purchases.” That’s the kind of story you can take into a boardroom.

✅ Coming soon: Influencer Outreach. It is the next piece we’re building into IQFluence so you can go from “shortlist” to “brief sent” without leaving the platform.