Fake it till you make it: Fake followers boost Chinese celebs

Remember that time when it was discovered celebrities and business leaders had fake Twitter followers, including Dell CEO Michael Dell and even Twitter board member Martha Lane Fox? The incident resulted in a large purge of Twitter bots but not much else.

Beijing police reportedly arrested a man surnamed Cai this week for artificially inflating the online popularity of local pop idols. The biggest star implicated in the case is young K-pop-style singer Cai Xukun, aka Kun.

An investigation by state media CCTV in February found that nearly a quarter of China’s 462 million Weibo users had shared and liked Cai Xukun’s new songs. Naturally, reporters thought this was more than a little bit suspicious.

The suspect was arrested for running a relatively new app called Xinyuan, which helps users create fake engagement. According to media reports, Xinyuan simulates Weibo accounts and shared content by cracking the social media platform's encryption, which helped make Cai about RMB 8 million (US$1.2 million) in six months.