The $20,000 spam account

A purchase you can't wait to avoid

there are better things to spend money on than used social media accounts, such as basically everything

If you have an extra twenty thousand dollars lying around that you just can’t wait to waste on something absolutely pointless, purchasing the X account @darkicon_ is always an option. The @darkicon_ account, which was created in March 2022 and listed on dodgy account sales site accs-market.com roughly one week ago, currently boasts a blue verification checkmark and just shy of a million followers. The account’s content is a mix of repetitive replies and assorted cryptocurrency posts, and it has been renamed at least twice in its two-year history. Although the sales listing for the account suggests that its sizable audience can be monetized to the tune of $6,300 a month, used social media accounts tend to be a risky investment due to their unfortunate tendency to get banned as soon as the social media platform notices that the account has changed hands.

tweetdecking is dead, long live tweetdecking

How does the @darkicon_ X (formerly Twitter) account allegedly generate $6,300 a month? According to the accs-market.com posting, the current operator of the account has been charging people hundreds of dollars a pop to post or repost content, with individual posts ranging from $250 to $520 depending on whether one pays for a single post at a time or splurges on the 10-post bulk package. Retweets and temporary pinning of posts can be had for an additional upcharge. Presumably, the value proposition here is the opportunity to get one’s content in front of the @darkicon_ account’s large audience, but the promotional services offered by @darkicon_ are only useful to the extent that its followers are authentic and active. (It is also worth noting that X, like most major social media platforms, has built-in advertising functionality that renders services of this sort largely redundant.)

even the reply boost that comes with X’s blue checkmark is insufficient to make people give a shit about these spammy replies

Most of @darkicon_’s recent posts are repetitive replies along the lines of “Hello team, I need to talk to you, can you DM me please?” or “Hey! Lets talk”. These replies are generally to popular posts from cryptocurrency/NFT-themed accounts, and may be attempts to drum up business. The view counts on the replies are quite low for an account with a blue check and nearly a million followers, which doesn’t bode well for the account’s viability as an advertising vector. It is unclear at present whether @darkicon_’s repetitive replies are automated or manually typed/pasted.

Wayback Machine is your friend

It turns out that the @darkicon_ account, which has the permanent ID 1499893227834519556, has only been named @darkicon_ for about a week. The account has been renamed at least twice, with the earliest known name being @darktuit. Based on available Wayback Machine archives, this was changed to @escritodark in early 2023, and then to @darkicon_ on May 23rd, 2024. The most recent name change coincides with the date the account was listed for sale on accs-market.com. New accounts have been created using both of the previous names (@darktuit and @escritodark); it is possible that these accounts are controlled by the same entity as @darkicon_, but the existence of new accounts with the same names may also be a mere coincidence.

some Wayback Machine X/Twitter snapshots are in JSON format and contain statistics such as the follower count at the time the snapshot was taken

Unfortunately, it is impractical to conduct a thorough analysis of the @darkicon_ account’s followers, due to the removal of X’s (formerly Twitter’s) free API. One can, however, plot out the rough trajectory of its follower growth using data from Wayback Machine, which indicates that the account gained most of its audience prior to May 2023, and subsequent gains have been substantially slower. Although there are no obvious signs of large numbers of fake followers, the account does turn up here and there on lists of accounts followed by Round Year Fun users under its previous handles, indicating potential use of the associated RealActiveFollowers follower sales website.