If you play imvu with the mobile client or visit imvu next from time to time you surely have noticed a bunch of accounts saying they do shoutouts for credits and gifts.

A lot of these accounts are fairly new and some even dating back to only 1 to 2 weeks ago but they have upwards of 30 to 40 thousand followers (I'm assuming they're using some sort of follow bot as their posts can barely reach 400 likes most of the time and those likes could be from bots too)

I really didn't pay much attention to it until I checked my imvu next notifications and saw that 5 shoutout accounts liked my photo at the same time and their posts had the same format (same background, text/fonts/text colors and even avatars sometimes) so it makes me think that it's only a handful of people doing it to gain massive amounts of credits or gifts.

Their posts usually will show an item that they got gifted or a screenshot of the gift message with a caption of how much they got gifted and the link to the profile of the person (I don't really believe these posts most of the time cuz it only shows one item that can cost maybe 800 credits and caption it with something like 20k, 17k).

If you're trying to boost your room visits or sales as a creator then I guess shoutouts are good but it all looks a little botted to me. I also see that they have changed their display names from shoutout to disclosure, maybe imvu is starting to notice all of these accounts.

What do you think of this? Have you noticed it and do you think it's botted/automated?

I have suspicions that all of the accounts that like your stuff are just cracked / h4c|<7d accounts botted with some openbullet loli file. Accounts placed on hold can still follow people, so it is a way for script kitties to profit off of the piles of cracked accounts that have been placed on hold.

Note: The IMVU Mafias do not support account cracking / hacking.

That would make sense seeing that lots of accounts get cracked all the time. I wonder why people pay so many credits just for a shoutout tho... it's just another way to get free credits/vcoin I guess.

yes! i did notice a huge rise in those bots! usually they like a bunch of posts and sometimes they would comment...usually it's L4L, F4F, or some other generic thing in that nature...sometimes but very rarely do i get DM's asking "hey! add me to ur friends list and i'll give u a shoutout/gift u!" sometimes they would even try to send me friend requests but ofc i always decline them cuz they're fucking bots

i see these bogus friend requests on a regular basis... and of course i ignore them. :p

5hy wrote:

That would make sense seeing that lots of accounts get cracked all the time.

yeah, what's up with that? are imvu accounts that vulnerable? or, are ppl mostly doing stupid stuff like sharing passwords?

Probably using passwords that are very easy to crack

I imagine that it is something automated or a new way for them to attract more public or followers

When hackers manage to h4c|< a website, they then sell all of the passwords for the accounts on that website to "crackers". Crackers are people who go around to other websites trying the same username / password to see if the users re-used the same password on other websites. Basically, the victims are people who re-used the same password on multiple sites (other than IMVU), and those other sites are vulnerable / got h4c|<7d. The crackers are just kids / low intelligence bottom feeders looting the corpses left behind by actual hackers.

IMVU tries to prevent this by locking an account (placing it on hold), if the owner's IP crosses country lines. That does not always work though if the cracker is using VPN's or lives in the same country as the victim. Even if an account is put on hold, the cracker can still bot the account and make it do stupid shit such as following / liking or sending out spam.