Darknet Diaries - Ep 27: Chartbreakers

Episode Date: December 1, 2018

Something is wrong with the Apple Podcasts top charts. As a podcaster, this personally annoyed and intrigued me. I investigate how this is happening and who is behind it.For show notes visit https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/27.This episode was sponsored by Nord VPN. Visit https://nordvpn.com/darknet and use promo code 'darknet'.This episode is sponsored by LPSS Digital Marketing, your source for honest, transparent marketing services for businesses of all sizes. Visit LPSS at https://www.lpss.co/ for details.

One day, a crow became jealous of a raven. That's because people listen to what ravens say, but not crows. So what the raven says is important because it's a bird of omen, and it can foretell the future. And because of this, the raven is held in great respect. The crow really wanted to get the same attention and reputation as the raven. So one day, he saw some travelers coming down the road and flew down to a tree by the roadside and cawed out as loud as he could. The travelers were nervous and in dismay hearing the caws from this black bird.

They feared it might be a bad omen, until one of them, who knew the difference between a crow and a raven, said to his companions, it's all right, my friends. We can go on without fear. It's only a crow, and it means nothing. This is one of Aesop's fables. The moral? Those who pretend to be something they aren't only makes themselves look ridiculous. But maybe it also means those who are capable of knowing the difference between a crow and a raven will be better off in life. These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I'm Jack Recider. This is Darknet Diaries.

This episode is sponsored by Delete Me. I know a bit too much about how scam callers work. They'll use anything they can find about you online to try to get at your money. And our personal information is all over the place online. Phone numbers, addresses, family members, where you work, what kind of car you drive. It's endless. And it's not a fair fight. But I realize I don't need to be fighting this alone anymore.

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off is to go to joindeleteme.com slash darknetdiaries and enter code darknet at checkout. That's joindeleteme.com slash darknetdiaries and use code darknet. Support for this show comes from Black Hills Information Security. This is a company that does penetration testing, incident response, and active monitoring to help keep businesses secure. I know a few people who work over there, and I can vouch they do very good work. If you want to improve the security of your organization,

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But the more you look into it, you realize the weirder it becomes, and nobody seems to know anything about it. And the itch just grows and grows, and before you know it, you realize you've been going down a rabbit hole for three months, investigating clues and keeping a journal full of notes and questions, and for every answer you get, it just raises more questions, so you keep digging and digging and desperately trying to find answers, and it just totally consumes you. Yeah, that happened to me. And I'm about to tell you what happened. It's a black hat story, but it's a different kind of black hat story than

the usual ones that tell. So bear with me on this one. It's more like a personal research project I did, or you could say this is my first attempt at doing investigative journalism. So it's obvious that I'm a podcaster, but check this out. Over half my listeners listen to me on Apple Podcasts, or otherwise known as iTunes. But not just my show. 60% of all podcast listeners are on Apple Podcasts. This is huge. Apple totally dominates the podcasting market. Now within the Apple Podcast app or iTunes is a list of the top podcasts, which is a list of the most popular podcasts for the day. And this is a highly sought after and prestigious list to be on. Being on this list means first that you made it as a podcaster, but second that you'll get a big bump in new listeners. When I first launched this podcast, I was so desperate to be on the list. And I was telling

all my friends, rate and review my show on iTunes, even if they don't even listen to it. I started watching this list obsessively to see if I was on it, where I was, and who else was there ahead of me. Every day I checked this list, and I even kept a spreadsheet of who's there and stuff. I guess you could say I became obsessed with this list. I began examining it, listening to most of the shows on it, and learning exactly how someone gets on the list. I started seeing some patterns. High-ranked shows were often from big networks, like NPR, Wondery, Gimlet, or from celebrity hosts like Joe Rogan, Tim Ferriss, or Malcolm Gladwell. And this makes sense. These shows can market a podcast easily because of their existing status. They can promote it on their other podcasts or from their million plus Twitter followers.

But see, the thing is, Apple will never tell us the algorithm on how to be on their top podcast list. This is a secret because as soon as we know it, people will be able to exploit the algorithm and cheat it to gain ranks. But even though they'll never spill the beans, I started developing a couple theories on what the algorithm might be. And as I was doing that, something strange happened. Out of nowhere, a totally unknown, obscure podcast hit the top 200 podcasts for the whole nation. It wasn't made by a celebrity. It didn't have any big branding support. It wasn't from any network. They had no social media presence, no website, and no mention anywhere on Google. What's more is that they had no ratings and no reviews. And no, it wasn't a brand new show. It had been out for two

years and had 50 episodes. Even if a show is remotely popular, it's going to have one review rating. But for this one to be around for two years with neither was really odd. How in the world did this completely obscure show rise above 99% Invisible, Radio Lab, or Reply All, and make it all the way to number 50 on the charts? There must have been a glitch or a bug or something on the charts. Okay, whatever. But as time went on, I saw another show do the same thing. Shows after shows were rising up the charts, hanging out in the top 200 of all podcasts for about a week and then dying off entirely. Some shows were understandable.

They had a strong launch, but people didn't like it and they fell off. But some of these shows had no web presence and zero reviews and zero ratings. I even listened to some of these suspicious podcasts and all of them were low quality and some downright terrible. Something was really weird. Whatever they were doing wasn't fair. These shows are doing something to break the charts, to corrupt it. Other shows are busting their butt and making amazing shows and earning their seat at the top of the charts. But then these shows would somehow just hack their way up?

The more I looked, the more shows I saw all over the place. Sometimes as much as 30 shows at once were all suspiciously up there. I'd tell you their names, but literally none of these shows are anything you've ever heard of. They're just so obscure and so small. But I took notes. For the last 10 years, my day job has been detecting when a hacker is in the network. It's my specialty to spot anomalies. And I've learned to trust that little man inside me that notices when something doesn't add up. He feels like a knot is in my stomach. Right now, I was feeling like I swallowed

a lump of concrete. Ever since I started this podcast, I've been studying up on marketing strategies. At this point, I've listened to hundreds of hours of podcasts about marketing and read dozens of books about marketing. I've kind of become good at it. So I started reaching out to these suspicious podcasts that were rated high on the charts, asking what their marketing strategies were because whatever it was, it was totally off my radar. But I got silence. None of them replied. All were very tight-lipped. I started looking into this more, trying to find articles on this and any information. Some people had theories about what was going on, but nothing concrete. I was glued to the news about podcasting, looking for anything about this. Then I saw one

guy take matters into his own hands. So I called him up. My name's John Perotti. I'm the manager of podcast production at WBUR, and I make podcasts. WBUR is the largest NPR station in Boston, and John spent the last five years making podcasts with them. I still work on Modern Love with the New York Times. I work on Last Scene, our podcast with the Boston Globe. By the way, the podcast Last Scene is amazing. It's about an art heist, and oh my gosh, I bet you would really love it. John doesn't just work on podcasts though. He's been working on NPR shows like Car Talk since way back. I've pretty much worked everywhere I can possibly work here in Boston. John saw something one day and got curious. I got a LinkedIn message from a podcast promoter from

Bangladesh who said, hey, I'm an expert. I can promote your podcast. You know, whatever. I mean, I just figured it was your usual junk mail. I screwed around with the person a little bit. They were asking $5. And then I thought, you know, for $5, I'll give it a shot. I PayPal this person five bucks and I said, hey, look, I have this podcast. Here's the RSS feed. Here's the $5. Go for it. Now, I'm going to put this as an aside, but it's a very important one. This was not a podcast I work on professionally.

This is just something that me and my friends had made like a year and a half ago. It had 300 downloads. I mean, there's no way this podcast should be on the charts. No reviews. No nothing, right? I come in the next day, this is a Friday, and the guy says, hey, today's, it's go time, it's going to happen. And I start watching, and my podcast starts climbing the charts.

Still no reviews, still 300, you know, nothing really seemed to have changed in my analytics. But boom, it starts rising, rising on the arts charts. 90, 50, 60. It makes it all the way up to number two on the arts charts midday and number 55 on the all categories charts. And then the guy sends me another message and says, hey, you want to set up a monthly payment plan. I can keep your podcast up here, which I definitely didn't do. I just kind of let it fall down. And it took about three days to fall completely off the charts again. Wow. Number 55 for all categories and the whole nation for $5. That's incredible. There's

subcategories on the charts, but I don't care about those. It's the all categories that matters to me. This is the big one. This is the golden ticket. By being ranked in all categories potentially means your podcast is going to start blowing up. And John got his totally unknown show to rank 55 for just five bucks. Beating out other shows like S-Town, Freakonomics, Lore, and Marc Maron. How did they do it? Let's be clear here. This isn't a podcast promotion at all. This isn't getting real listeners to listen to your show and have it organically rise up to charts. It's not marketing to some mass audience or getting new listeners. This is chart manipulation or algorithm hacking or something else. And John wasn't sure how they were doing it and neither was I. But it was at this

point that I became determined to figure out what was going on here. Like I said, my marketing game is strong and my fascination with hacking is even stronger. So I just really wanted to know what was going on here. What's the trick? How do you hack the charts? And I was also curious who was behind all this. I'm on LinkedIn too and I set my profile there to say I'm a podcaster and guess what? Out of nowhere, the exact same person who messaged John also messaged me. I had a million questions for them, but their English wasn't very good,

and they kept repeating the same thing. Sir, I'm an expert podcast promoter. Order me, and I'll make your podcast top rank. It was about this time I got another person message me on LinkedIn. Same scenario. They claimed to be an expert promoter and told me to order them. In the next few weeks, two more people messaged me on LinkedIn. Same scenario. They claimed to be an expert promoter and told me to order them. And the next few weeks, two more people messaged me on LinkedIn and then another on Facebook. I had to start organizing these details better. So I broke out an old journal, you know, one of

those that you're given at a conference with the elastic band and the pen. I started writing down these people's names and any information I had on them. Each of them wanted me to order them. So I asked, where do I even order you from? They all pointed me to their Fiverr accounts. Fiverr is a website where you can go hire freelancers to do work for you. And sure enough, if you go on Fiverr and search for podcast iTunes top rank, you'll see dozens of people offering podcast promotion on iTunes. I examined these pages. I opened up 20 tabs of similar podcast promotions. The pricing structure was almost all the same, and the English was all not very good, and they claimed to all give top rank on iTunes charts. As I compared them up, every account had two strange commonalities.

First of all, all the accounts were created just a few days or weeks ago. And second, all the accounts were from Bangladesh. Specifically, Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. I took a lot of screenshots and notes from Fiverr, which generated a lot of new questions. Why were they all from Bangladesh? And what exactly is their secret? I went back to the people on LinkedIn and asked a bunch of questions. What's the tactic? How long have you been doing this? Where are you from? And how does it work? I kept getting a runaround of answers, almost like canned messages. They would almost always say the same thing in response. Sir, I'm an expert podcast promoter. Order me and I'll give you top rank. Nothing helpful or concrete. It was time to take this to the next level. I asked one if I could

call him and he said, no, no, no, no calls. The second one I asked said no too. The next guy I talked to was named Henry Bin. I messaged him a lot on LinkedIn and I learned his name isn't Henry, it's Rocky Bull. And I asked Rocky Bull if I can talk to him on Skype and he said okay. Hello? Hello sir. Hi, this is Jack. Yeah, thank you for adding me. Yes, of course. You're in Dhaka? Yeah, I'm from Dhaka. Okay, great.

I talked to Rocky Bull for a while. He's a nice guy, super sweet, studies sociology at the university. And when I asked him how he does his promotion, he tells me. Sir, I subscribe the Apple ID on iTunes. He tells me this is his full-time job. Even though he's trying to get his degree from the university, he makes all his money doing this. I do it minimum 16 hours a day.

I asked where he learned how to do this. And he started to tell me that he learned it from one of our brother. Can you give me his name? Actually, I don't know him. I learned it from my friend. This is a little suspicious. He said his brother taught it to him, but when I asked his name, he didn't know it and said it was a friend instead. I asked him if he could introduce me to the person who taught him, but he told me that's not possible because the guy who trained him made Rocky Bull promise to never tell anyone

where he learned it from. Oh, really? Like this just made the mystery deeper. Too many secrets. I felt like our conversation was getting circular, and so I got off the phone with him. I scribbled a lot more notes down in my journal and went back to looking at other podcast promoters. Another guy was lighting me up on LinkedIn. His name was Showhag. I got on the phone with him. Sir, I have minimum 1,000 or more worldwide team. They will download promotion and listen.

Wow, 1,000 people? There's no way he has 1,000 people working for him around the world. But is this a clue? Does he have 1,000 Apple IDs or something, and he uses that to subscribe with? More notes taken. I'm starting to feel like Carmen Sandiego now. I then asked him if he's promoting any shows currently, and he told me he's promoting the number two show in technology. Okay, I show number two as... Yes, yes, yes.

That's the one you're promoting yes sir yes sir i'm giving you the url this was a show that had some ratings and reviews but its history showed it just appeared on the charts out of nowhere all of a sudden passing by my show the wall street journal podcasts and even reply all and no it's not part of any network or has any celebrity hosts. So it just seemed really strange that the show was ranked so high. I asked Sho Hag over and over exactly how do you promote podcasts. And he stuck with the same story every time. I asked for another clue. Is there an office that you guys work out of? Like, can you show me a picture of this room

with all these devices? Okay, wait, sir. I'll take a picture and we'll give you... He sent me a photo. It looks like he's in an internet cafe setting with three guys sitting in plastic chairs using laptops. I had no idea if these were really people he's working with or not.

But it doesn't matter. This is a clue, and maybe a big one. So I printed this photo out and tacked it to my wall. I then asked him, I said, But when I asked if I could meet him, Shoheik started selling me his services again, saying he's a top-notch promoter and there's no need to meet his brother. He kept

asking me for money, so at this point, I let him go. I watched the charts, and sure enough, the show he was promoting fell off three days later. I tore pages out of my notebook and tacked them to the wall too. I broke out some red string and started connecting some dots. My wall now has a picture, people, places, tactics, and strings outlining the whole operation. What still seemed missing though is why every promoter I met was in Bangladesh. Was there some mastermind behind this whole thing? I went back to Rocky Bull and asked him to show me his equipment

and he sent me a photo of four laptops. One was completely off but the other three had iTunes opened on it and our chat window was on one. Another picture for the wall. Now I have an equipment section. Then I get another message on LinkedIn from another promoter. I ask if we can talk on Skype. Hello?

Hello, hi. What's up? Hello, how are you today, sir? Yeah, I'm fine. How are you? Good. I talked with him for a while. He has said I don't use his name. It's the first time he's ever talked to anyone in the U.S. OMG, first time. And he was kind of enjoying the experience.

I told him I'm a journalist trying to do a story on people who are gaming the charts. I hear you clicking a lot right now. Are you promoting right now? Yeah, he's promoting right now. I asked him to explain how it's done, and he tells me everything in so much more detail than anyone else. Click connect, sign in with an Apple ID, go to the podcast URL, subscribe, and look for the button on the far right next to the episode. Clicking get on all the episodes queues up all the downloads at once in the background. And this counts towards your podcast ranking. So just click get on every episode in the whole feed.

No need to wait between clicks or listen to anything. Then wait a while after downloading all episodes. Wait about one minute. Then stop the downloads, log out, and log in with a new Apple ID and do it again. I asked him how many Apple IDs he has. Yeah, I have 10,000 Apple ID I have. He uses 10,000 Apple IDs to do this with. And he actually offered to give me the list.

If you want to do that, I will give you Apple ID, no problem. You give me the username and password. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. This is Microsoft Excel sheet and I will Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. This is Microsoft Excel sheet and I will give you no problem. What a nice guy.

These Bangladeshis were all so kind. Secretive, but kind. I ask him how many times does someone need to do this to get ranked on the all categories chart? 50, 60. Yeah. Sometimes 30, 40.

This is very interesting. Only 50 subscribers to get on the all categories chart this is so fascinating because there's over 500 000 shows on apple podcasts and now i have a new sense of how good the top 200 shows are i mean if what he's saying is true then theoretically the top shows are only getting about 50 new subscribers a day, which doesn't seem like that much. And that's actually a surprise to me. I felt like this was a lot of information for my wall, so I thanked him for his time and got off the phone. I became curious if promoters would tell me which shows they're promoting. So I asked all of the ones I was talking to, what podcast are you promoting right now? This took a little convincing, but some of them did send me the shows they're promoting.

All were highly ranked, but seemed very suspiciously high ranked. Bad cover art, lame descriptions, low effort shows. I'd rather not name any of these shows, but they're probably ones you've never heard of. I collected all this information and I started noticing trends, patterns, and behaviors that these podcasts were exhibiting. And I started using different tools and websites to help identify shows with these same indicators. And this led me to discover many more shows that were gaming the charts. I began getting really good at spotting shows doing fake promotions. And I found four fairly popular shows on the charts that had indicators that may be gaming the charts too. So far it's been easy to spot really small shows because their numbers are just so low.

But this was new because these shows were actually popular, so it made it a lot harder to detect. One show was ran by a popular author, and the other was interviewing big-time celebrities. So it was really shocking to see how some of these shows that appear legit might actually be faking their way to the top. I couldn't tell for sure, but that little man inside me knew something was off with these shows. At this point, someone on Twitter with the name John Watson started tweeting. His photo was of a young clean-cut white guy, and he was claiming to be an expert podcast promoter. And he was proudly posting screenshots of the shows he

was promoting, out there in the public for everyone to see. I looked at the tweet, and he was claiming to promote three of the four shows I had just identified as potentially gaming the charts. Shows you might even recognize, but I doubt you would listen to. I reached out to the three shows, asking about this, and one did get back to me. He said yes, he did hire someone from Bangladesh to do this, and it was a mistake, and he even did an episode on his podcast about this. I looked up his show, and it's a show about the mistakes he's made in life that have made him stronger, so I kind of found it funny and was happy to see he was redeeming himself. Let's just say the other two shows refused to speak on the record. But the thing is, seeing this tweet and getting that one other podcaster to admit that he was doing it really solidified my belief that the other ones most likely were too.

I messaged this promoter, John Watson, asking if we could talk on Skype. Wait, I just realized John Watson is Sherlock Holmes' sidekick. Gosh, is someone messing with me? Like, well, the game's afoot now. John's Twitter picture is of a young, fashionable white guy with good-looking hair. And John is claiming to be promoting three big podcasts that trigger three of my indicators for potentially gaming the charts. So I'm hoping John is like some native English speaker, maybe the guy who started it all. After what seems like months, I finally get him to talk on the phone. Hello?

Hello? Hello, are you there? I finally get him to talk on the phone. Hello? Hello? Hello, are you there? No, not a native English speaker. He tells me he's from Bangladesh, and his name isn't John, it's Jason. I look up at my wall of people and faces and realize every single one of them have given me a fake name at first. Sir, I have a worldwide team.

Sir, I have a worldwide team. They can market your podcast and provide real and organic customers. He says he's promoted 15 podcasts and charges $500 a month and says he has a lot of repeat customers. If this is true, Jason has pulled in over $5,000 doing this.

And that's a lot for DACA. He goes on to tell me that he can deliver 1,000 new subscribers a month, which will be enough to get me in the top 200. I asked Jason specifically how he gets so many new subscribers. He tells me, actually, this is a secret because he says it's a secret because if he told me I wouldn't need to hire promoters. I asked him the burning question, the question nobody wants to tell me the answer you. Where did you learn this from? Oh, sir. In the past, I learned from my boss. He's the best podcast promoter in my country.

Not only my country, in the world, I think, because I love him so much. What's his name? MD Monawar. MD Monawar. Say again? He's MD Monawar. MD Monawar. What's his name? Say again? MD Manowar. Finally going up the chain.

I drew a big question mark on an index card, wrote Manowar on it, and tacked it to my wall. I listened further. Manowar is the first person who discovered how iTunes podcast promotions worked. After that, he trains up young people. At this point, everyone who learned about podcast promotion learned it from him. So we're in love with him so much. Out of nowhere, our Skype call drops. But the new card I just put on the wall, I remove it. And I put it above all the others now, thinking this might be the main guy, the one who started this whole thing and popularized this in Bangladesh. M.D. Manawar.

Maybe he has all the secrets, all the answers. Maybe he'd even teach me all the tactics. I turned all my focus to finding him. But could I do it from the other side of the planet? I barely have any information other than his name. And even if I did find him, would he tell me anything? After the break, we talk about books. We hear from Seth Godin. Hey. And maybe Manowar. Maybe. This episode is sponsored by NetSuite. What does the future hold for business? You don't know? Me neither.

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List. My eyes narrowed. You ever get so deep into something that everywhere you look, you just can't stop seeing it? Or like if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail? I was now wondering, is it possible to corrupt the New York Times bestseller list? Right there in the bookstore, I got on Twitter and messaged Phil Stamper. Phil works for a big book publisher in New York, which gives him early access to the list. But not only that, Phil is an up-and-coming author, so he's glued to the list, always watching what's coming and going on it.

I asked him what it means to be on the list. What's kind of important about the list is that you kind of get the reputation immediately because you can put that on your next book, number one New York Times bestselling author, or just bestselling author if you didn't hit number one. There are always movie deals that come from books on the list. It's a mix of prestige, but then also it turns into real sales because you walk into any Barnes & Noble or any airport bookstore and they're going to have their bestsellers up there. And so it kind of starts to trickle down and affect really the entire perception of what books are good. So by getting your book on the list, you could skyrocket your career and

fill up your bank account. I asked him if he's ever heard of a book that was gaming the system or cheating the charts. He said that one day a book did show up on the list and it was very suspicious. What was weird about this was none of my publishing friends, none of my author friends, none of my agent friends knew anything about this publisher who had never published before or this author or this book and when you googled you couldn't even find information about it. To Phil this was really strange. I went on a deep dive because anytime something like this happens, I kind of feel impelled to figure out the source. I'll save you some details.

Phil didn't find any reason why the book was on the list, and he was truly baffled by this. It just doesn't, in no world would that be possible. He decided to ask for help. I started putting it on Twitter, just questioning it. I wanted to know what this publisher was doing. Like, this was their debut novel. He decided to ask for help. Phil has a modest Twitter following, a few thousand people. He pointed out these strange things and wondered what his followers would think of this. And like I've never in my life, like, had something like that happen.

So it just like, it exploded. A lot of people were finding this really suspicious too. Another author, Jeremy West, started investigating this too and was sharing what he found with Phil. As that started picking up traction, that's when booksellers started reaching out. They came to us, they explained that there were some unusual buying patterns that they noticed for this book. Bookstores were contacting Phil and Jeremy, telling them that they were getting weird calls.

Somebody was calling and asking if the store reports their sales to the New York Times. And if they did, the caller would order a bunch of these books, exactly 29 of them, which is one less than what is considered a bulk order, which is reported differently. Phil looked at the number of sales for this book, and it had 18,000 copies for the first week. For a book to sell 18,000 copies in the first week is considered a sensation, especially for first-time authors, and has every right to climb the charts. But it sounded like a lot of these books were being purchased by the same person or group. A lot of news agencies reached out to Phil and asked him to do news interviews and discuss what he knew. The news of the story spread fast. Within eight hours of my initial tweets, the Times, they had made changes to the list. And like, it was kind of an unprecedented

move. Like, they don't really make changes. And that was it. The book was removed from the bestseller list after 23 hours of being there. Journalists from Vulture followed up on this story next to try to figure out what happened. The author denied doing anything shady to game the charts, but this Vulture journalist couldn't let the story go and kept asking more questions. The author said she had a lot of pre-orders for the books by going to conventions to hype it up and was preparing to go on a book tour and sell her books through the website. So when the book was published, she needed to fill those pre-orders and stock up on her own books. The author says she called around to bookstores asking if they reported sales to the New York Times and if they did, she'd buy them up.

Because selling books at a convention doesn't count as book sales for the New York Times, and she wanted it to count. She says she sold 13,000 books as pre-orders and on her book tour, and the other 5,000 through her website. But in the book sales world, this is an astonishingly high number for the first week. Too high for a new author like this.

It was just very suspicious. While people investigated the story, clues led to a book marketing company called Result Source. This company has hit the news before in scandalous ways. They have historically been accused of gaming the New York Times bestseller list. After reading a lot of articles, it seems that Resultsource has been able to get books on the New York Times bestseller list for about $200,000, presumably by buying the books like the way you just heard Phil tell us about. Now, $200,000 seems like a lot, but done right, you could get a million dollars back in sales. So it appears this marketing company has figured out the algorithm and has done this many times in the past. The author admitted to talking with Resultsource, but never admitted to hiring them.

She said she did hire a marketing company, but she wouldn't say which one because she's under an NDA. For Phil, this book stood out only because it was a first-time author and first-time publisher and no visible marketing, so this made it easy to spot. But imagine if a celebrity were to do this. It would be almost impossible to notice any suspicious activity going on. And yes, there are stories of celebrities actually hacking their way onto the New York

Times bestseller list. I pondered what this means as I went back home. I sat in my chair and looked up at my wall. Oh yeah, my wall. MD Manawar, the black hat mastermind of iTunes. I started looking for him again. The MD is short for Mohammed, which is a very common first name in Bangladesh. I had his full name and searched for him on Facebook, but there's a lot of Manawars in Bangladesh. I couldn't tell which one was him,

so I friended up every single podcast promoter I could find on Facebook, waited a few days for them to accept my friend request, and then looked up Manowar again. This time, I was able to find one Manowar who had a lot of common friends as me. The same podcast promoters I just friended. I read through his account details. It says he founded a company called Podcast Secrets. Wait, the company is called Podcast Secrets? When I asked all the promoters where they learned this from, they told me it was a secret. And now I find out the company is called Podcast Secrets. Talk about the clues being right in front of my face and not even knowing it. I'm like the worst investigative journalist ever. Podcast Secrets has a website. I look at it. It says they do podcast promotion as a service. I feel like I'm finally getting somewhere.

This has to be the main guy. He looks cool. He's stylish. He's hip. Maybe late 20s, tech savvy. Gotta talk to him. I message him on Facebook. Do you do podcast promotion?

Almost immediately, he writes back, no. I ask, well, do you teach others how to do podcast promotion? He replies, who are you? I tell him I want to learn how to do podcast promotion. And he asked me, how did you find me? I asked if we could speak on the phone. He says maybe, but puts me through a strange series of checks. First, he asked for my phone number. I give it to him.

He calls it and immediately hangs up. He asked what number just called me. I give him the number. Then he asked what city my phone number's from. I tell him it's like he's validating me or something. He then says we can talk on Skype now. I connect with him on Skype, but then he tells me he'll talk to me in 20 minutes. I wait so impatiently, staring at my notebook,

running my fingers over the strings and pictures on my wall. It's all adding up. This guy has to be someone important to this whole operation. He knows so many of the promoters. Jisun says he's loved by many people. He's acting really suspicious. He is the secret. The waiting is killing me. He finally calls me. Hello? After a few seconds and some chibbers, she hangs up on me.

What the heck is happening here? I don't know if he's getting cold feet or what. I try messaging him. No response. Did I get too close to the top? Does he not speak English? Did I just lose my best lead yet? Did I say something wrong?

What's going on? My phone's ringing. Hello. Hello. How are you today? Yeah, I'm good. I'm sorry. My Wi-Fi I'm good. I'm sorry. My Wi-Fi connection is disconnected.

Oh, he had Wi-Fi problems. Okay. I ask if he does any kind of podcast promotion. Yes, I do. Podcast promotion, but not like the others. Sir, could you please tell me about how do you find me on Facebook? He says he doesn't do promotions like the others. What does that mean?

This guy's English is far better than the others I talk to, and he sounds sharper and smarter than the others. Someone who may be able to crack the iTunes ranking algorithm. Do you teach other people how to do podcast promotions? No, sir. Who is this seller who tell you this information? Could you please tell me your name? I tell Manawar how I found him. I talked to him for a long while. I actually begin to really like him. He's smart and kind and cool. If I lived in Bangladesh, I'd want to be his

friend. He says he's not a podcast promoter, but instead an editor and producer of podcasts. I felt like he knew more than what he was saying, though. He did know a lot about podcast promotion, so I asked him where he learned it from. How did you learn to do this? I got this information from another client. He gave me this information first. And then I'm trying to work on Fiverr, but a few days later, Fiverr already banned my Fiverr account. I'm pretty sure this is a big clue,

so let's unpack it. First, he says he learned this from another client. You know, one other podcast promoter told me the exact same thing. So it might just be possible that a podcaster came up with this idea and just wanted to hire cheap labor in Bangladesh to do it for him. Second, he says his Fiverr account was banned. I write all this in red ink from my wall to follow up on later. I asked Manawar many times if he teaches others, because remember Jisan said this is the guy who taught him and many others. But this was his typical response. No, sir. I don't treat others because they are doing

fake work on Fiverr and I don't like that. And that's why I already stopped this work and trying to do audio editing and audio production. Ask him again

where he learned this from. I also learned from another guy from another country first time and start working but I think this is not valuable work for me and not creative work and that's why sir I already stopped my Fiverr account. I already stopped all this work. I was starting to believe him at this point. He made a lot of really great points and this work is shady and not creative or satisfying but since i had him

on the phone i asked him more stuff how do you do it uh i just download the episode that's it there's download the episode that's it but sir uh please do not do for yourself because of if you do this method then itunes definitely banned your podcast he kept trying to convince me not to promote my own podcast like this. He even tried to talk me out of using other people from Bangladesh since it could get my show banned. Some people are doing this work for money. This is not the creative and real work. I went back to my old notes one more time.

I clicked on all the Fiverr links I had saved from before and the links weren't working. None of them. I switched browsers and tried again. Nothing. I could browse Fiverr just fine, but all the promoters had their accounts banned. And Manowar told me his Fiverr account got banned too. I asked Fiverr's customer support what's up with this, and they responded by saying they're going through and banning these accounts because it's against the terms and conditions that Apple has. And since it violates that, it violates their own rules. I looked up Apple's terms and conditions that Apple has. And since it violates that, it violates their own rules.

I looked up Apple's terms and conditions for iTunes and read it. I could only find one thing in there about this. It says, You may not use iTunes to plan or engage in any manipulative activity. I guess gaming the charts could be considered engaging in manipulative activities, so okay. I reached out to Apple for clarification or a comment, but they referred me to a PR team, which didn't get back to me. In fact, Apple has been mostly quiet on this matter.

I could only find one public comment that they had about this, and it was in their 2018 Apple Worldwide Development Conference. Here's what they said. We're continually refreshing and managing our directory, automatically retiring shows which run afoul of our directory content guidelines, such as those with spammy content or shows seeking to manipulate the top charts. Don't do that. Just please don't do that. Actually, there's no mention about chart manipulation in their directory content guidelines at all, so this doesn't technically go against

that. But it still could be seen as going against the Apple Media Services terms and conditions. I have no visibility into what Apple has done about this, but from my point of view, down in the muck for four months, I haven't found any shows that got kicked out for doing this. I asked all the promoters if they've ever heard of a podcaster complain because they got their show kicked out, and they all said no. And the bigger shows that I think may still be gaming the charts are still there in the top 30. Right now, today, as I make this, I just counted and I found well over a dozen shows that are just cheating the charts like this. And four of them were in all categories alone. So I hope Apple can figure out a way to detect this and update the algorithm, or else they risk losing credibility. The New York

Times takes their list very seriously, and when they received evidence of some shady activity going on, they removed that book from the list. Apple should also take their charts seriously too, or else their reputation may suffer. But here's the thing, I don't think it's right for Apple to kick out shows for doing this, because someone could use this as a weapon. I could hire one of these promoters to promote one of my rival shows and get them kicked out of Apple Podcasts, which would then make me climb the charts because it would eliminate the shows above me. So I just really want Apple to put filters in place to nullify this or change how the algorithm works. One thing that's missing from my wall of cards and string is ratings and reviews.

This wasn't mentioned at all by any podcast promoter. And like I said, I was seeing shows at the top of the charts with zero ratings and reviews. So these don't matter whatsoever for getting a podcast to rise up the charts. I'm pretty positive on this too. And this is great because imagine if it did matter how many horrible and phony ratings and reviews we'd see all over podcasts. It would just wreck the credibility of the system altogether. I talked with Rob at Libsyn, a podcast hosting provider,

and he says ratings and reviews are only good for making onto the What's Hot chart, and nothing else. I find this worth mentioning because there's so many podcasters today asking you to leave a rating or review because they think it helps them climb the charts, but it doesn't. Look, I still think you should leave a review because it totally makes that podcaster's day, but if they say it helps more people find their show, tell them about this episode. And now that I know about this, I'm never going to ask you, my listeners, to leave a rating or review because what's the point? I'd much rather you tell a friend directly to listen to this show

because it's much more effective. I sat back in my chair and looked at the big wall of notes, pictures, and string and compared to all the strategies everyone told me. At this point, I feel like I have a good grip on what's going on here. There are basically two different strategies. One is just to subscribe a lot using a bunch of different Apple IDs and the other is to subscribe and download by clicking the get button. And you apparently only need to do this 30 to 50 times a day to get ranked. I'm not entirely convinced that downloading episodes helps your ranking at all. I think

that's done more to hide this activity and make it look like a real person has subscribed and listened to a bunch of episodes. So after researching this heavily for four months, I'm pretty sure the algorithm to be ranked on the charts is simply number of new subscribers a day and week. And that's it. It's actually quite simple. Ratings, reviews, and downloads simply aren't needed to rank up in the Apple podcast charts. Oh, and as to why there's so many secrets about all this,

I think an American podcaster or two figured this out and then hired and taught people in Bangladesh to do this, even if it was just an experiment at first. And when it worked, they kept it going, but only if the promoter promised to never tell anyone where they learned it from or who they're promoting. But in my quest to learn more, I got some promoters to spill some names to me, and some were actually big podcasts. And when I spoke to those larger podcasts, some of them did admit to me privately that they did in fact use promoters, but they don't anymore.

And that's probably because they actually got big doing this and don't need it anymore. Now as to why this is so popular only in Bangladesh, I think if a podcaster taught someone there, then the technique just got passed around between brothers and friends. See, the thing is, IT freelance work is exploding in Bangladesh. It's now the third largest source country for freelance IT workers, according to Upwork. It's now the third largest source country for freelance IT workers, according to Upwork. It's very popular with people under 25 because they can work cheaply, they understand IT, and all they need is a computer and internet. So when you plant a seed like this in a place like that, it grows quickly. And I just think that's why there's so many promoters from

there. After taking this journey, I found yet another list that was corruptible. I read an article about a guy who created a fake restaurant on TripAdvisor and did a lot of fake reviews on it. He kept reviewing it every day and in no time his non-existent restaurant was the top rated place to eat in all of London. His phone was ringing constantly from people wanting reservations. So how far does this chart manipulation go? What's next? Top selling products on Amazon? Top seller games on Steam? Top rated apps on my phone? Even my Netflix queue seems suspicious now. Are all lists corruptible? Maybe. But this kind of chart manipulation isn't new. This is what's known as black hat marketing. I told you this was a black hat story, remember? Black hat marketing is where marketers will do something against the terms of service

to gain an advantage over others. One example is to post a video to Reddit and then buy a bunch of upvotes for that post. You can buy like 100 upvotes for 20 bucks. And that could be enough to get people to notice it and it ends up hitting the front page of Reddit, and now you've got scores of people watching your video or visiting your website. This is the world of black hat marketing, and it's been around for a long time. The trick is, just like you heard, figure out the algorithm for getting on the list, and then figure out a way to cheat the algorithm. But pretty much all black hat marketing leaves you at risk of being banned on the very place you're trying to be popular. So it's a risky path to take. And the path is not always so black and white. You don't always know if you're doing a black hat marketing strategy or a white hat marketing

strategy. And people sometimes fall for the wrong trap. I mean, especially when you're seeing services so easily available on sites like Fiverr. Places like that shouldn't allow any black hat techniques at all. So podcasters who are trying to make it, they see this opportunity and go for it. And this is why I don't want to call any of them out. They might not even know what they're getting themselves into.

Someone who taught me a lot about marketing is Seth Godin. And he has a few books that actually did hit the New York Times bestseller list. Seth said something the other day on his podcast Akimbo that really put me in deep thought. So I'll give him the final word here. In my industry, one of the big issues is, are you a New York Times bestseller? Well, I got off that merry-go-round 10 years ago, and I'm glad I did. The New York Times bestseller list

is famously corrupt. It is really easy to buy your way onto the list. And I would argue at any given time, a quarter to a third of the books in the nonfiction section have bought their way there. You don't buy your way there by paying the New York Times. It's not corrupt like that. It's corrupt because if you organize around buying masses of books from the right bookstores on the right day, you can send a signal to the editors who put together the list. They will misinterpret that signal and put you on the list. The point is, once you realize that a signal has been corrupted, you have a choice. You can embrace the fact that it's corrupted because other people are still

looking at the signal, or you can walk away and invent new, more honest signals that you want to live with. And the point of this rant is that I think we need to do both. I think at most organizations, you shouldn't show up at a job interview in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts. You need to pay the price to pronk, to show that you're a poison frog, to waste resources on your interview suit because you're trying to show people that you are culturally aware and willing to overinvest in a certain kind of signal. But as we move forward and the world becomes ever more connected, as we invite more and more people to where they rightfully belong, with a seat at the table, where diversity creates value, we're going to have to discard so many

of the old signals and embrace new ones, ones that are more relevant and useful going forward. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. You've been listening to Darknet Diaries. Thanks for sticking with me on this one. I had a lot of fun investigating it and making it. A big thank you goes out to our guests, John Perotti and Phil Stamper. Also, a big thanks to Seth Godin for being such an inspiration and giving me permission to use his voice here. Seth has a new book out. It's called This Is Marketing, and I just can't wait to read it. Many, many more thanks goes to Kevin Goldberg at Discover Pods, James Cridland at Pod News, Rob Walsh at Libsyn, and Dave at Chartable.com for helping me research the story. This show is

made by me, the felonious Fisher, Jack Recider, and the theme music is by the harmonious Breakmaster Cylinder. Break it down.