Which artist manager has been caught buying fake followers on social media recently? The manager – who represents a number of the higher echelon DJs – has been talking lately about the importance of a large following on the socials being necessary to continue getting “quality bookings”.

And by “quality bookings”, he means bookings for lots and lots of money – meaning his own earnings will ultimately be bigger. Unfortunately, some of his DJs aren’t posting on social media as often as he’d like – meaning those follower numbers aren’t going up as much as he wants them to.

The result? He decided to turn to fake follower services online – sometimes offering thousands of new followers for just a few dollars. The followers are, of course, nothing more than bot accounts – and the likes of Instagram have got wise to the practice over the years.

The accounts of a number of his artists started gaining specific amounts of new followers per day – a thousand here, two thousand there, and so on. Unfortunately for him, Instagram noticed what he was up to and placed restrictions on the accounts – in one case, they almost banned the artist’s account entirely.

Indeed, things got so bad that he had to use his network of connections – basically, a friend of a friend works in a prominent position for Meta, Instagram’s owners – to contact the platform. He was forced to personally deliver a humiliating apology over the phone, admitting to what he had done.

The plan did work, however – with all of the accounts having their restrictions removed. And he got a 30-day suspension…