Katy Perry, Spam Magnet

A couple of weeks ago, I uploaded a pic of my latest bead portrait to Instagram:

Katy Perry proved to be very popular, and she currently sits at over 150 "likes". I like to think it's due to my workmanship (she did take a lot of altering and tidying up from the original design), but I'm realistic enough to know that it's probably due to the boobs. It's always the boobs.

Anyway, as the praise poured in I started to notice a trend forming in the comments section. Here's a pic of the most recent comments posted:

It appears there is a new spam syndicate in town. That's a lot of suns, a lot of extremely similar messages, and a random model claiming to have gone to school with me. Not one genuine comment in the last eight. And these are just the comments that fit on one phone screen, there were more before too. Notice how they're all female, easy on the eye, and most of them have the same username format: word-number-word. If you look at their profiles it becomes clear they're spammers, with generic selfies and claims of being able to get you more followers. 

The #katyperry hashtag seems to be the magnet for this bullshit, as I've never had it on any of my other photos. Instagram recently had a mass profile clearout too, where they deleted loads of inactive and spam accounts. Seems like the spammers fought back. This is the annoying thing about social media - sorting out the real people from the spammers.

And for the record, it's hard to figure out if you went to school with someone based on a black & white photo of their stomach 15 years later.