found this creator through a college acquaintance who does event photography. Not a close friend, just someone whose taste i usually trust. 112k followers, lifestyle niche, engagement looked fine at a glance. not amazing, not suspicious. Wired $2,400 for a feed post plus three stories promoting my home goods line. Got 4 sales. Total revenue: $196.

literally screenshotted the follower count and sent it to my business partner like that meant something. like 112k was a credential.

the creator delivered exactly what we agreed on. good content, on time, no drama. i assumed the problem was my landing page or my offer. Spent a week tweaking copy and discounts before i finally did what i should have done before paying: actually looked at who followed them.

used some free tool I found googling at 2am. Sampled maybe 200 followers. Roughly 60% had zero posts, private accounts with no profile picture, or follow counts in the tens of thousands. just shells. of the remaining 40% that looked active, i checked maybe 80 bios and locations. indonesian usernames. Indonesian location tags. Comments in a language i don't sell in. I'm US based. i don't ship to Indonesia. I don't even have international checkout enabled.

I know, sample size of 200. but i was desperate for it not to be true. kept refreshing the tool like it would change.

The thing that made me actually stop and stare at my screen: realizing i had seen follower count and a surface engagement rate and called it due diligence. i never checked audience geography. Never spot checked for zombie accounts. i treated a big number like proof of distribution, and it wasn't. the creator wasn't necessarily scamming me. maybe they bought followers years ago. Maybe they got swept up in a growth loop I can't see. but my $2,400 bought me reach to an audience that either didn't exist or couldn't buy if they wanted to.

now I check 50 random followers minimum, no exceptions. location breakdowns, actual follower accounts, and if the creator won't share audience insights, I walk. almost booked another one last month, 85k followers, same niche, same red flags when I checked. same college guy actually recommended her too.

Found the wire receipt from the first one last week, crumpled in my desk drawer while i was looking for a stamp. Don't even know why I kept it. $2,400.

got tired of doing this by hand so I built an open source tool called Kol Proof (https://github.com/qruiqai/kolproof) to score it. it flags bought or zombie followers and audience mismatch, like the Indonesia thing, before I spend. Built it with an agentic coding tool called Verdent. it's beta though and only works on X/Twitter right now, so Instagram is still manual for me. The scores are just a filter, not a guarantee