What are the risks of buying or renting old online accounts?

For many businesses who need to manage multiple accounts – ad agencies, ecommerce companies, affiliate marketers and more – it can be tempting to bolster your roster by buying ‘warmed up’ or old accounts. However, in many cases, this is a fast track to these accounts being banned. We explain why, and what you can do instead.

What are warmed-up accounts?

First off, a small refresher. What we refer to as buying warmed-up or old accounts is when people purchase pre-existing accounts, such as Facebook ad accounts, Google users, ecommerce vendors, which already have a history behind them.

The thinking behind people doing this is that it means these accounts have built up a profile; theoretically, they’ve already been used to browse the internet, building up a pattern of activity that helps to establish it as a regular, trustworthy account.

However, as we shall see, that is a shaky premise.

What are the risks of buying old accounts?

Consider how the major platforms many of us use regard our accounts as legitimate. Although the factors are almost infinite and constantly evolving, as our research shows, we can sum it up into an expectation that you as a user display normal behaviour without sudden pivots, that your online identity is complete and makes logical sense and that you are not attempting to block that identity from being explored.

However, when you buy an old account, you do not know whether any of this applies to these accounts – and even if it does, their transferral to you could jeopardise it. Let’s look at a few simple areas as examples:

• Geolocation: if you buy an account that was built up in India and you are using it in the United States, this sudden switch in location can ring alarm bells.

• History and cookies: You have no way of knowing what this account has been used for; has it already been banned from certain platforms, for instance? Has it previously been used to run multiple campaigns, maybe even evading detection, but then only to see your addition to it be the last straw?

• IP address: A big red flag if you’re renting or buying a warmed-up account is its IP address. Generally speaking, the best kind of IP is a residential IP, as this is what the majority of legitimate users on the internet use. However, many accounts use what is called a datacenter IP: an IP that tries to hide your true IP by displaying that of a datacenter proxy. As these are easy to acquire in bulk, they are widely employed for nefarious uses – meaning your accounts will be put into the same basket.

These are just three of the many, many variables that make buying pre-warmed accounts a big risk for your business. It is not hyperbole to say that because an account is not banned today, it doesn’t mean it won’t be banned tomorrow – and with that an income stream is gone.

So, if you shouldn’t be buying accounts, what can you do to create multiple accounts with lower risks of banning?

How to build up multiple accounts

The safest option is to built up these multiple accounts yourself. Now, to do so literally yourself would be extremely time-consuming, but this is where Multilogin can help.

Our software allows you to quickly create multiple virtual browser profiles with controlled browser fingerprints, natively mimicking those of a physical machine, taking as little as sixty seconds to set up. From there, you can use each profile to create accounts as you need for your business on platforms like Facebook, Amazon or eBay. By using our CookieRobot tool, you can set each browser profile to automatically create its own cookie history based on the sites you choose it to crawl.

To find out more about how Multilogin can help you, have a look at the Pricing page to find the best solution for you to move your business from shaky to firm ground today.