AI grifters have created thousands of fake influencers to push dropshipped goods on TikTok

Since late 2025, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram have seen a spread of accounts run by AI-generated influencers who pose as real people selling handmade goods. In reality, it's a large-scale scam: products from Shein, Amazon, and other marketplaces get repackaged in attractive packaging and passed off as original work from small businesses.

How the scam works in detail

Here's a concrete example. TikTok hosts an account called @aliyahsbuckles.store. The persona, Aliyah, is a light-skinned African American woman in western-style clothing. In a viral video (March 2026), she sits in front of the camera crying and begs viewers to watch her video and save her belt buckle business. "Even as a black woman, I have more faith that white women will stay 13 seconds on this video to save my belt buckle business," reads the text overlay. Aliyah wipes a tear from her cheek; her eyes glisten.

But Aliyah doesn't exist. Her face, her expressions, her tears were all generated by a neural network. The buckles she supposedly makes by hand in her workshop are standard mass-produced Chinese blanks that the scammer bought in bulk for pennies on Alibaba or Shein.

The scale of the scam: thousands of accounts

This isn't an isolated case. There are many accounts like this. According to The Verge, thousands of these influencers are currently operating across TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. Each tells a variation of the same story: I'm a small business, I'm desperate, help me, check out my product.

Scammers pick this playbook because it works. The strategy leans on several psychological traps:

• Emotional manipulation: tearful videos, stories of desperation, and pleas for help trigger sympathy and lower viewers' critical guard
• Racial stereotypes: in Western culture, images of Black women, immigrants, and people in financial hardship are often associated with an "authentic small business" and prompt a desire to help
• Platform naivety: TikTok and Facebook algorithms are optimized for engagement, not for detecting scams
• Fast repackaging: products arrive at rock-bottom prices, get repackaged in a nice box, and sell for 5-10 times more

Why the platforms can't keep up

TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram rely mostly on automated moderation and user reports. But these accounts often rack up followers and sales quickly before anyone notices them. On top of that, spotting an AI-generated face keeps getting harder: modern neural networks produce realistic images that are difficult to tell apart from photos of real people.

What this means for the future

Generative AI enables a new class of fraud that wasn't possible at this scale before. Now everything can be automated: spin up 10,000 AI influencers, upload different videos, spread them across platforms, and wait for some of them to pay off before they get banned.

For consumers, the takeaway is simple: be more careful with supposedly "authentic" stories on social media, especially when a story seems too perfect or emotionally manipulative.

*Meta is designated an extremist organization and banned in Russia.