Our seller told us that the current prices on the market for Facebook and Instagram were between US$1.50 and US$3 for 100 followers. Around US$223 could buy you 10,000 followers on Facebook. And if you wanted to add another 10k for your Instagram, that would be less than US$300.

Twitter, however, was a bit trickier and more expensive, my seller warned us. Still, the temptation was too high: My following on Twitter had always been kind of pathetic so I bought myself 100 followers for US$5.30 just to test if the service actually works.

According to the seller, opting for ”fake“ followers -- meaning bots -- would have been cheaper but also riskier. The platform declared a war against bots last year, reportedly banning millions of them in a few months.

We'll update this story when comments from Twitter and Alibaba become available. 

So where do all these invisible followers that Chinese vendors are selling actually spawn from? Videos of click farms in China have gone viral in the past showing how large these operations can get. They use powerful computers to string together hundreds of thousands of phone cards to create fake engagement. Click farms are also known to hack into other smartphones through malicious apps to hijack traffic.

But China is just one of the countries known to host click farms for foreign platforms, with much of the action also happening in Indonesia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and India – many aimed at Western buyers. 

In the meantime, my Taobao seller seems to have kept his promise: I got 56 new followers by the end of the day. Now, I only have to hope that Twitter doesn’t ban me.