The easy way to identify fake followers on Instagram is to use a service that does it for you. There are a bunch of apps on the web that will scan your profile, or at least sample it – as mentioned above – and can tell you what followers look like fakes. Hype Auditor, FakeCheck, and IG Audit are all possibilities.

The problem with many of these apps is that they will tell you a percentage of your followers that look fake, but won’t necessarily show you which followers they flag. They also all have different sets of criteria and different sample methods, so your ranking from one to the next will vary.

If you choose to manually scan your followers, or if you just want to look over every new follower when they follow you, here are some things you can watch for.

• Look for nonsense names. Some bots are very transparent and just use usernames like “a3874302”. They’re generally not good accounts.
• Look for comments left by the account. If every comment they leave is a very generic “nice pic” or single emoji reply, they might be a comment bot.
• Check if they have a ton of followers, but their content sucks. This is a judgment thing to a certain extent; what you think of as bad content might not actually be bad content.
• Check if they follow a ton of accounts, but have few or no followers. Some people use an account just to watch their friends, but not to use themselves. However, they rarely rack up thousands of people they follow.
• Look for stolen content or utterly generic content. Some spammers make their accounts look legitimate through content theft, so it might not be a terrible idea to save and reverse image search a photo or two. Of course you can’t save directly, so you will need to view the page source and find the image URL to save it.
• Look for completely empty profiles. An empty profile might not be a fake account, but it probably isn’t useful to have following you one way or another.
• Look for profiles that only have a few posts, or only a single post, when that post is promoting some kind of offer. A lot of scammers create accounts that promote what looks like a contest, then follow any account that responds to a real contest, in hopes of phishing user information.

If the account looks decent and you follow it in return, watch it for the next few days and check to see if it unfollows you. Despite being a bannable offense, many people still try to use follower churn techniques. Even perfectly good accounts can pull this trick, so if they unfollow you, unfollow them right back.

Of course, there’s no strict formula. Use your best judgment for whether or not an account looks like it’s worth keeping around. You can always remove someone who is a legitimate follower and hope they follow you again, though sometimes bots do that too. It’s really a mess out there, and I wouldn’t worry too much about it, all things considered.