mrkt
@wenlambo@mrkt — a giveaway gives away the grift.
We already chronicled in the exaple of @portals how a cute little gift marketplace blossomed into a full-blown casino. But @mrkt, allergic to resting on laurels, also runs giveaways. Because what better way to grow than promising free stuff while quietly charging you for the privilege of importing an army of digital ghosts?
What is a giveaway?
Supposedly, it’s a promo: you offer a prize, people subscribe, and your channel drowns in organic love.
Theoretically!
In practice, it’s a dignified way to pay @mrkt so they can populate your channel with accounts old enough to remember when Telegram still looked experimental.
What did we do?
We ran two free giveaways in 12 hours. Each offering a single digital gift purchased on the same marketplace for 2 TON, plus 0.4 TON in fees.
Total damage: 4.4 TON.
A cheerful little bot (@mrkt) acted in our group as admin, policing subscriptions like a hall monitor on a power trip.
The result:
60,000+ new subscribers. Right there in the public Telegram channel info. A number so majestic it could make a real influencer weep genuine, unfiltered envy.
The scheme:
@mrkt doesn’t send fresh humans as naive people might think. It sends time travellers. Thousands of ancient Telegram accounts shuffle into your channel, smash “Join,” and immediately retreat to their digital sarcophagi. Zero views. Zero messages. Just pristine subscriber-count inflation, gift-wrapped.
The numbers (or: The comedy hour):
• Channel proudly displays: 60.301 subscribers.
• Many of them display: “last seen 1 week ago.”
• The giveaway began: 12 hours ago.
• Actual humans engaging with the content: perhaps 150.
They joined yesterday.
They were last alive last month.
Beautiful.
What happend?
Telegram’s “last seen” status only updates when a real human opens the app. Joining a channel, however, can be done entirely through API access using stored session keys — no active online presence required. So @mrkt’s bot simply nudged these dormant shells awake, marched them in like obedient zombies, pocketed the fee, and let them return to their eternal slumber. Neat, right?
The final insult:
Removing the bot does nothing. The zombies are already permanent residents. You can fire the wedding officiant, but you’re still married to 60,000 corpses. The only cure is manual removal — one agonizing click at a time — a purification ritual that will cost you days of sanity but may return your subscriber count to something resembling honesty.
And..., as I’m rereading my little work, I have to take back what I said earlier. The 4.4 TON damage turned out to be a valuable lesson:
The subscriber count is a liar. The “last seen” is the confession.
Creator’s note:
A giveaway that delivers real people > good.
A giveaway that delivers bots but admits it > at least honest.
A giveaway that delivers something you never asked for > @mrkt.