New York AG, in precedent-setting settlement, finds selling fake followers and likes or using stolen IDs on social media is illegal in its case against Devumi
New York (CNN Business)A company that brought in millions of dollars in revenue by creating fake social media posts and comments …
Context & Ripple Effects
This settlement closes an arc that began when Eric Schneiderman's office opened its investigation into Devumi a year earlier, following reporting on how the company ran more than 3.5 million automated Twitter accounts, many built on stolen social identities, to sell followers and retweets to over 200,000 customers.
What makes the deal precedent-setting is the legal finding itself: the New York AG now treats selling fake followers and likes, and hijacking real people's identities to do it, as illegal conduct rather than a gray-area growth hack — giving enforcers a template beyond this single company.
First-order effects
- Devumi's core business — selling manufactured engagement sourced from bots wearing stolen identities — is now formally illegal under New York law, ending the revenue model outright and exposing the celebrities, journalists, and others who bought its followers to reputational scrutiny.
- People whose names and photos were used to populate Devumi's bot army gain a state-level legal finding that their identities were misused, not just a platform terms-of-service violation.
Second-order effects
- Platforms fighting the same problem get leverage: Facebook has already sued a New Zealand firm over fake Instagram likes, and a state AG ruling that fake engagement is illegal strengthens both private litigation and future regulator cases.
- Other state attorneys general and the FTC can cite the New York finding when pursuing lookalike vendors, turning what was a one-company probe into a prosecutable category of conduct.
Third-order effects
- The stolen-identity element pushes enforcement toward likeness governance: if fake accounts built on real people's identities are illegal, the next targets are the brokers who harvest and resell personal identity data for synthetic personas.
- Purchased follower counts become a liability signal rather than an asset, pressuring the influencer-marketing economy toward verifiable, audited audience metrics.
The trend: Regulators are converting social-media engagement fraud from a platform policy problem into consumer-protection and identity-theft law, with New York's Devumi settlement setting the template.