$100K/Year Sneaky AI That Plugs Your Product Online

The service in your title, Replyguy, is a black-hat tool, it breaks both Reddit’s and Twitter’s ToS, as it uses bought and/or stolen accounts (as confirmed in the ProductHunt answers by the dev himself) to astroturf (another ToS violation in and of itself) on the customer’s behalf.

Which wouldn’t be an issue, but..

I believe calling it “sneaky” is a severe understatement, even for online marketing standards, as it gives the wrong impression to your audience who might not be technical enough to understand this and its implications.

In fact..

The dev clearly knows how bad this sounds, if you carefully read through the entire ReplyGuy landing page it is conveniently omitted everywhere except inside of a FAQ at the very bottom of the page.

It’s obviously up to the individual to choose which tools align with their ethical and moral standards, that’s not my point.

But when you put out content that leaves out the – to the trained eye – glaringly obvious and severe, but lesser-known downside and severe risks of such services to an audience of mostly beginner entrepreneurs, I don’t believe you’re serving them according to your values and intentions. Which are clearly nothing but amazing.

Services like ReplyGuy work by the software providers buying stolen (usually via credential stuffing) accounts from everyday people, and use the authenticity derived from this stolen online identity to promote products in a deceptive manner. Potential prospects need to know about this, as the developer will obviously try his best to hide it.

Besides this, after just 2 minutes of research into ReplyGuy, it’s glaringly obvious the dev, Alex, is shady at best..

He’s intentionally and knowingly misleading potential customers by using verifiably fake and made-up testimonials and “proof” that his product does what he claims to do.

You can check for yourself:

In the “real showcase” picture at the top of the sales page, we see 4 reddit accounts, of which:

• one is deleted (will be a recurring theme): https://www.reddit.com/user/animegabe
• one never posted the comment which is being showcased: https://www.reddit.com/user/jaymanji
• one never even existed at any point in time (you can verify this by going to the old reddit design, where you’ll be greeted with a 404 error, instead of a suspended or deleted error): https://www.reddit.com/user/samanine
• and one is real.. out of 4.

But sure, maybe it’s just an edited picture with placeholder names to showcase the idea quickly… except it gets even worse:

The sales page claims: “People love our replies, really.  Our replies are authentic and relevant, never spammy.” above a picture of 7 reddit comment screenshots which prove this point..

… except out of those 7 reddit accounts, 5 are incredibly suspect of being made by Alex, the dev himself. See for yourself:

• https://www.reddit.com/user/inside-clock-318 Created 8 months ago, only activity is one comment, the “showcased” comment is either deleted or never existed in the first place
• https://www.reddit.com/user/infamous_leading_303  created 9 months ago, no activity (presumably deleted his own comment after screenshotting it as a “testimonial”: 
• Deleted account: https://www.reddit.com/user/kfhensley09
• Purchased account which came online 8 months ago, and its first comment ever was the one showcased on his sales page: https://www.reddit.com/user/dizzy-air-6153
• No sign of the screenshotted comment in the user’s history: https://www.reddit.com/user/beardedanarchy

Quite the coincidence that all these accounts were created or woke up from multi-year dormancy just when the service launched.

Furthermore, using this service is a free ticket towards getting any mention of your site permanently banned from even being mentioned in subs, if not from the whole Reddit, as the bot accounts he showcases on his landing page are all suspended permanently by the Reddit account team:

• https://www.reddit.com/user/ophelia_sk
• https://www.reddit.com/user/alexandr-bel

And even those which do not get suspended, quickly get shadowbanned from subreddits by the mods. Case in point, look at this account of theirs which is shadowbanned from multiple AI subs. This can be verified by checking the URL of the comments: one two three