Inflated audiences are still common. A quick check before payment is worth the few minutes it takes.

Inflated audiences are still common enough that a quick check before any payment is worth the few minutes it takes.

• Sudden, unexplained follower spikes with no viral moment behind them
• Engagement rate that doesn't match follower count for the niche
• Comments that are generic, repetitive, or from clearly unrelated accounts
• Followers with no profile photo, no posts, or obviously unrelated audiences
• A like-to-comment ratio that looks too clean and round

Free and paid audience-analysis tools can flag a lot of this automatically, but a manual scroll through recent comments catches things tools sometimes miss. It takes five minutes and can save a campaign from being built on an audience that doesn't actually exist.