With influencer fraud becoming more and more prevalent, and as the industry continues to search for ways to address fraudulent activity, influencer marketing platform Mavrck is leading the charge and releasing new, automated tools to help combat influencer fraud. Mavrck’s methodology is designed to assess and indicate follower and engagement fraud to empower marketers to make informed decisions about influencers based on their risk tolerances. With beta testing now complete, Mavrck is rolling the capability out to select customers as a premium feature and will make it available to more customers in the coming months.

“Thanks to the sophistication of influencer marketing platforms, the number of influencers being activated by marketers has grown exponentially over the last two years–there were more than 21 million #sponsored posts created in 2017 alone,” said Lyle Stevens, Co-Founder and CEO of Mavrck. “Unfortunately, the methods by which some bad actors try to game the system with fraudulent followers and engagements have also grown in sophistication to the point where visual inspection is no longer good enough to filter out fraud, especially if you’re activating thousands per month like some of our Fortune 100 customers. To help address this growing problem, Mavrck has developed an automated way to flag an individual as potentially engaging in fraudulent activity so that a marketer can filter out bad actors.”

Also Read: TechBytes with Liz Gottbrecht, VP Marketing, Mavrck

Taking a sample of 3,992 Instagram influencers with at least 5,000 followers, Mavrck found that 394 (9.8%) engaged in fraudulent behavior by buying followers or engagements. To address this issue, Mavrck developed a machine learning algorithm that assesses a statistically significant sample of an influencer’s followers, as well as accounts that like or comment on that influencer’s posts, to determine if an Instagram account is from a real person or if the account is operated by a bot for the purposes of creating artificial followers, likes, and/or comments. Based on Mavrck’s analysis, an account can be flagged as being High, Medium, or Low risk of having purchased followers or engagements. This helps Mavrck customers to ensure that their campaigns are being executed by influencers who best fit their brand needs and objectives.

Mavrck’s new fraud detection efforts represent one of many steps that the company has taken to guide influencer marketing into the future this year. In April 2018, Mavrck launched its new Macro-Influencer Workflow Automation capabilities, which enhanced the platform’s existing workflow automation and provided improved measurement of the full impact of macro-influencer content. Mavrck customers are now able to measure influencer content across networks, and they can track and attribute actions driven as a result of that content to achieve brand objectives.

Recommended Read: Interview with Lyle Stevens, Co-founder and CEO, Mavrck