nothing says “totally legitimate business model” like a bunch of extremely new social media accounts with similar biographiesIf you scroll through posts on X (formerly Twitter) that contain links to Gofundme or other crowdfunding platforms and take a gander at the engagement, you’ll notice that fundraiser posts are frequently reposted by multiple similar-looking accounts that describe themselves as “crowdfunding experts” or something of the sort. Many of these accounts are recent creations and have little or no content outside of reposts and replies promoting crowdfunding posts. These accounts often show other signs of inauthenticity as well, such as the use of plagiarized profile photos. It is presently unclear to what extent this inauthentic engagement is actually desired by any of the people who post the fundraisers that the spam accounts amplify.this list of accounts is available in plain text hereStudying inauthentic activity on X is a somewhat more cumbersome endeavor than it once was, due to the removal of API access for researchers. Nevertheless, through a combination of manual exploration and creative utilization of tools such as Nitter instances, some degree of data gathering does remain feasible. Exploration of the engagement on recent X posts with Gofundme links yielded a set of 59 crowdfunding spam accounts, with creation dates ranging from April to November 2023. Many of them have no content whatsoever other than reposts of various fundraisers; some also spam repetitive replies advertising their spammy services. who doesn’t own their own hospital, after all?Not all of the spam accounts…Crowdfunding and platform manipulation