On October 15, 2026, the phone number a bot farm needs to open a TikTok account cost less than a cent, and hundreds of thousands were for sale: $100 bought 135,916 TikTok verifications, according to the Cambridge Online Trust and Safety Index. Truth Social sign-ups were just as cheap. Facebook, Instagram and X cost more because they turn away cheap bulk numbers and want one on a real SIM card, but not much more: the cheapest numbers that could open an account on them were 31 to 42 cents.
How a fake American is made
When you open an account, the app texts a code to your phone and you type it back. Websites rent out a number for that one text, priced by platform and country. Cambridge researchers say the biggest of these sellers have “major customer bases in China and the Russian Federation,” often take Russian and Chinese payment systems, and run sites whose grammar “suggests Russian authorship.” The cost falls on the people the accounts are aimed at: one such service, raided in Latvia, was linked to more than 3,000 fraud cases and over €5 million in losses.
The number’s country barely matters. On Facebook, Instagram, X and TikTok, nobody can see the number behind an account, so it can come from wherever SIM cards are cheapest. On October 15 the index’s cheapest numbers for Facebook ($0.42), Instagram ($0.33) and X ($0.31) were all Indonesian. TikTok numbers cost under a cent in dozens of countries.
The American part is the profile: a name like John Smith, a flag, a photo, a line about being a patriot, and posts in fluent English, which AI now writes. Every network in Meta’s latest threat report used generative AI, including what Meta calls “full-stack synthetic personas.” Nineteen days before the November 3 midterms, in the same week X, OpenAI and Meta reported foreign networks aimed at US voters, that is all a fake American takes.
The University of Cambridge launched the index, known as COTSI, in December 2025. It tracks the daily price and stock of phone numbers sold to pass a platform’s SMS check, across more than 500 platforms and 197 countries. The researchers identified 17 vendors, kept the top 10 by traffic, and use four at any one time. The October 15 figures are NovaKnown’s own reading of the live index. It redraws every day, so each price below is dated to that day.
The sellers do not hide. Dr Jon Roozenbeek, senior author of the study at the University of Cambridge, describes “a thriving underground market” in which political influence campaigns are “readily and openly for sale.” The Latvian service that Europol shut down “appeared to operate as a legitimate business,” with “a polished website.”
| Platform | Cheapest number to verify an account, Oct 15, 2026 |
|---|---|
| TikTok | under $0.01 (dozens of countries) |
| Truth Social | under $0.01 |
| Google/YouTube/Gmail | $0.03 |
| X | $0.31 (Indonesia) |
| $0.33 (Indonesia) | |
| $0.42 (Indonesia) |
Anton Dek, co-lead author and a researcher at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, explained why some platforms cost almost nothing:
“One SIM card can be used for hundreds of different platforms. Vendors recoup SIM costs by selling high-demand verifications for apps like Facebook and Telegram, then profit from the long tail of other platforms.”
Facebook and Telegram customers pay for the SIM card. Every other sign-up that card can pass gets sold off as the long tail, and on October 15 that tail included TikTok and Truth Social.
Put that in a buyer’s terms. Verifying 10,000 fake accounts on TikTok or Truth Social costs under $100. At the cheapest listed prices, 10,000 on X would cost about $3,100 and 10,000 on Facebook about $4,200.
Where the number does matter
Election demand shows up on the apps that display the number. Across 61 national elections, verification prices rose an average of 12% on Telegram and 15% on WhatsApp in the 30 days before the vote. On those apps an operator posing as a local has to buy a local number. Facebook and Instagram showed no such link, and Roozenbeek explained why:
“A fake Facebook account registered in Russia can post about the US elections and most users will be none the wiser.”, Dr Jon Roozenbeek, University of Cambridge
Not every number works. When the researchers tried to verify fake US Facebook accounts themselves, it worked 21% of the time with one big provider and over 90% with another. Dek said virtual numbers bought in bulk from business telecom providers carry metadata that “many platforms have learned to block,” while a number on a physical SIM is “much harder to distinguish from a normal consumer’s number.” That is why the farms are full of real SIM cards.
This week’s takedowns, and the farms behind the numbers
On October 15, X suspended more than 13,000 accounts in three networks it tied to Iran, Russia and China. The networks targeted candidates and public figures across the political spectrum ahead of the midterms. In 2021, the platform suspended 238 Iranian accounts.
On October 8, OpenAI banned two operations. An Iranian one used seven fake Western “journalist” bylines to place almost 100 articles in about a dozen small and medium outlets. It also produced batches of comments, mostly about the US-Iran war. A Russian one, nicknamed “Dark Clark,” targeted Latin America. It became the first operation OpenAI rated Category 5 on the IO Breakout Scale, which runs from 1 to 6.
The Iranian comments OpenAI could find drew likes and replies “in the single or double digits,” which rates Category 2. Across 30 operations, OpenAI says the ones that place content in real media outlets, “rather than relying on fake social media distribution,” reach the most people. That matches the 906 fake reports under real news brands NovaKnown documented this month.
The same report shows that count is a floor. Many replies “did not appear in our open-source searches,” OpenAI wrote, possibly because they were posted by accounts “that had already been taken down.” Three of the personas’ X accounts had been suspended by August 2026.
The fake journalists also depended on fake accounts. “Michael Harrison” had profiles on Medium, X and Facebook, and “Ervin B. Hoskins” on X, Facebook, Instagram and Threads. When Dark Clark’s LinkedIn front struggled to build a following, its fix, by the operators’ own reports, was “to create more fake accounts to follow the first one.” Cheap accounts are the infrastructure, not the payload.
Meta’s second-half 2026 threat report, dated August, says the United States has been the most targeted country since its reporting began in 2017. Russia is the largest source over that period with 53 networks, followed by Iran with 41 and China with 14. Under its fraud rules, Meta disabled about 575,000 Facebook accounts in Pakistan that it believes were “likely warehoused to later be used as pre-aged inventory.” The actors, Meta writes, “increasingly resemble markets rather than campaigns.”
The best material for these accounts is a grievance that happens to be true. In June, OpenAI banned a China-linked cluster that wrote comments claiming AI data-centre buildouts were raising family electricity bills. The claim holds up. In the PJM grid, capacity prices rose from $28.92 to $329.17 per megawatt-day between 2024/25 and 2026/27. The market monitor, Monitoring Analytics, attributes 63% of a recent auction’s increase to data centres, about $9.3 billion recovered from customers. The deception was in who was speaking, and OpenAI found no meaningful breakout. Outrage carries the message: research in Science found people share outrage-provoking misinformation without reading it.
All of this runs on hardware. Europol’s raid in Latvia seized 40,000 active SIM cards and 1,200 SIM boxes from a service that authorities say created more than 49 million accounts. It is the same service tied to more than 3,000 fraud cases. In September 2025, the US Secret Service found more than 300 SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards within about 35 miles of UN headquarters in New York, enough to send 30 million texts a minute. Officials said the operation potentially posed a risk to the UN compound.
A viral video in April 2026 showed what a farm looks like: racks of screenless phones running social accounts. NovaKnown has traced the bot farms and fake accounts behind One Nation in Australia. When Ukrainian drones knocked out Yandex data centres, the people they had been targeting reported that the pro-Kremlin comment swarms went quiet.
Who could raise the price
Some countries already pay more. In the year to July 2025, Cambridge found the average verification cost $4.93 in Japan and $3.24 in Australia, because of SIM costs and photo-ID rules, against $0.26 in the US.
National rules can also be routed around. Russia banned third-party account registrations, and vendors suspended Russian numbers from September 2025. Vendors operating from Russia kept selling other countries’ numbers. The UK passed a law banning SIM farms in April 2025, but Cambridge says the index can track its effect only “once it is implemented.”
The researchers also recommend labels showing an account’s country of origin, and OpenAI’s report shows those labels working. “Ervin B. Hoskins” claimed to be “an American freelance writer,” but the platforms’ transparency settings located his accounts in Iran. Dark Clark’s think-tank account on X showed a German location but connected through the Russian App Store. Cambridge notes that many vendors also sell ways to get around such labels.
Platforms set the price too. Reddit, which removes about 100,000 accounts a day, began labelling automated accounts on March 31, 2026, and is exploring passkeys and third-party ID checks. TikTok and Truth Social decide what proof of a person they accept at sign-up. On October 15, the proof they accepted could be bought for under a cent.
Meta’s own report says disruption “displaces threats; it rarely eliminates them.” If the operators behind X’s 13,000 suspended accounts move elsewhere, TikTok and Truth Social were the cheapest doors on October 15, at under a cent a number.
The test before November 3 is Telegram, where posing as a local takes a local number and verification prices rise about 12% in the month before a national vote. On October 15, a US Telegram number cost $3.10, and 205 were in stock.
Further Reading
- SMS Verification Statistics by countries, COTSI, Cambridge’s live index of daily SMS verification prices and stock; source of the October 15, 2026 US figures.
- Price of a bot army revealed across hundreds of online platforms, University of Cambridge launch of COTSI, with platform prices, vendor customer bases and the Facebook test results.
- Cheap online fake accounts make misinformation a thriving underground market, Euronews coverage of the Cambridge study, with country prices and election price surges.
- X suspends 13,000 fake accounts, The Cyber Express on X’s October 15 takedown of networks tied to Iran, Russia and China.
- Disrupting AI-enabled “false front” operations, OpenAI’s October 8 report on Dark Clark and the Iranian journalist-persona operation.
- PRC-linked influence operations are targeting AI debates in the US, OpenAI’s June report on the “Data Center Bandwagon” and “Tech and Tariffs” clusters.
- Meta Second Half 2026 Adversarial Threat Report, Meta’s report on coordinated inauthentic behaviour, AI personas and warehoused accounts.
- European police bust network selling thousands of phone numbers to scammers, The Record on the Europol-backed SIM farm raid in Latvia.
- Secret Service dismantles telecom threat near United Nations, SecureWorld on the SIM servers found near UN headquarters.
- Reddit human verification changes, Help Net Security on Reddit’s bot labels and planned identity checks.
- Misinformation exploits outrage to spread online, McLoughlin, Brady et al. in Science on outrage and sharing.
- Projected data center growth spurs PJM capacity prices by factor of 10, IEEFA on data centres and rising grid capacity costs.
- Today I learned what a social media bot farm looks like, TechRadar on the viral video of phone racks running social accounts.