“Do you want to play with me?”

“Hey! I want real dating!”

“Is there a woman who is prettier than me?!”

If you’re one of the tens of millions of people following the Premier League’s top sides on Instagram, these comments may sound familiar.

The Athletic has spoken to several insiders from top clubs about how they are dealing with the relentless wave of “pornbots” — accounts posing as scantily-clad women that direct users towards websites hosting pornography. As clubs try to maintain a family-friendly image to millions of fans around the world, they are battling against pornbots that are exposing fans to viruses and scams.

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To determine the scale of this problem, The Athletic analysed the top 10 most-liked comments underneath the most recent 50 Instagram posts from all Premier League clubs over a couple of days earlier this month. (Focusing on the most-liked comments means analysing very prominent posts that lots of ordinary fans will see, not trawling through thousands of innocuous comments to dig out a handful of unsavoury examples.)

Here is what we found.

The real goal of these accounts is not just porn but also to spread malware, viruses and “phishing” — obtaining people’s personal details for the purposes of fraud, explains Stefano Cresci, a researcher at Italy’s National Research Council and a specialist in tracking bots on social media.

“It’s rather easy to take a picture of a half-naked woman and lure users into a security scam or fraud,” he says. “Having these bots rampaging on platforms can cause a lot of problems. They’re exploiting something that is popular — it allows them with little effort to reach a wide audience.”

The term “bots” implies high levels of sophistication and technological complexity but this is misleading, says Cresci. “It doesn’t take a huge effort to set up a large bot network with hundreds or thousands of automated accounts.”

As well as pornography, other spam accounts push dubious financial schemes involving foreign exchange or cryptocurrency, while others offer to sell social media followers. Like pornbots these are often pushed to the top of the comments feed after attracting hundreds of likes from other fake accounts.

“Sometimes they are run by individuals who are simply looking for income,” says William Dance, a linguistics and disinformation expert at Lancaster University. “This income is generated by convincing Instagram users to click through to their profiles and visit retail links — the account owner is then paid a commission for any products that are sold.”

Spammy accounts often appear almost instantly after a post is uploaded, says one person familiar with big football clubs’ internal processes. Bots latch onto various popular hashtags or keywords, flood multiple accounts at once, then comments are swiftly liked by dozens of other bot accounts, pushing them to the top of the comment feed.

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“You don’t even need to hide — it takes a few days for platforms to find you and ban you,” says Cresci.

The vast majority of the top comments on the Instagram accounts of Burnley and West Bromwich Albion are simply fans of the club talking about football — celebrating a goal or criticising a player’s poor performance. The league’s biggest clubs, though, are very different, with a large number of the top posts coming from accounts posing as women dressed in revealing clothing, posing sexually suggestive comments, and imploring users to click on their profile, where a suspicious link will direct people to more explicit content or a potential scam. This is clearly a problem for brands who have children as many of their followers.

Pornbots appeared in the top 10 comments for more than half of the sample of Instagram posts analysed for six of the Premier League’s 20 clubs: Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur and Leicester City.

“These automated accounts gravitate to these larger clubs because as a general rule they have more Instagram followers,” says Dance. “If a bot receives engagements, such as profile visits, comment likes, and story views, it is less likely to be flagged as a bot because its behaviour seems authentic. Making sure that you have a wide audience is one way to assure this. Second, these are simply the biggest audiences.”

Pornbots are a problem for big Instagram accounts in general, not just football-related ones. But football accounts are especially popular because of the real-time frenzy of activity that the sport generates. A late goal or controversial red card can spark massive online engagement, which spammers and scammers can piggyback on to make money.

Curiously, Liverpool’s Instagram account did not have many pornbots despite the club having the second-most followers in the league after Manchester United.

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A club source says comments are manually removed every 15 minutes by club staff, a labour-intensive process which seemingly goes further than other clubs, though all the club insiders spoken to by The Athletic see social media spam as a big problem and say active measures are being taken to root it out.

Tottenham Hotspur is the sixth-most followed club in the Premier League and, alongside London rivals Arsenal and Chelsea as well as both Manchester clubs, lots of pornbots were prominently visible under the sample analysed by The Athletic.

A club spokesperson says the welfare of supporters is a priority, with the club using profanity filters to filter out offensive terms, alongside club staff actively moderating comments to remove “anything that is clear to be spam or posted by bots”.

“We are committed to taking action to reduce the prevalence of postings of this nature and will continue to try to reduce the presence of these automated comments to ensure our fans are not exposed to such content,” the spokesperson adds. “The existence and removal of these accounts on the platform, however, is something that can only be controlled by Instagram.”

It’s not just English clubs that attract spam. Real Madrid and Barcelona have far more followers than any Premier League club and both attract a huge volume of porn bots.

It’s a problem for top players, too, many of whom have huge following of their own. For example Manchester United are the Premier League’s most followed club but do not have as many followers as their midfielder Paul Pogba. This week he posted on Instagram to dispute a “fake news” article about him quitting the French national team, supposedly in protest against controversial comments by President Macron about Islam. The post was instantly flooded by porn bots.

It’s not just Pogba. Plenty of other players have huge personal Instagram followings, and their accounts are awash with spam. Just like with clubs, the volume of spam seems closely linked to the number of followers an account has, and is an Instagram-wide problem rather than one affecting specific players. Although elite footballers’ PR operations are increasingly slick and their social media channels professionally run, they are not sophisticated business organisations like their clubs are, with legal departments and multiple social media employees. This means players’ accounts are even more likely to be rife with spam, potentially exposing even more fans to harmful content.

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Officials at all the big clubs communicate regularly with staff at Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites, Several other well-placed sources pointed at Instagram as holding primary responsibility for cleaning up their platform rather than clubs themselves.

Researcher Cresci agrees. “It is very difficult to fight on the side of the club,” he says. “It is a battle that should be fought at the level of the platform, and Instagram has had this problem for a long time.” Facebook, which owns Instagram, removed over 2 billion bot accounts in the first quarter of 2019 alone.

Leicester City have a big global following after their spectacular title run four years ago. A spokesperson says the club proactively filters and removes comments by a process that is “constantly” reviewed. “We welcome the support of major social media companies to manage an issue that clearly reaches beyond football and affects all users of their platform.”

As well as Instagram’s anti-spam measures and human moderators, a source inside another top club says external companies have been brought in to help tackle the relentless wave of spam on social media.

One source inside a top club says that, though pornbots are a big problem, it is inevitable that getting rid of them is not a priority compared with policing abuse directed towards players, especially racist abuse. That tends to “come in waves” after a high-profile incident such as a missed penalty or red card.

While swear words and outright racist slurs are generally picked up by automatic processes, sometimes people deliberately misspell words or use images instead of text, to get around these filters. Some things still slip through the net — earlier this year a 12-year-old Aston Villa fan was arrested after sending racist images to Crystal Palace player Wilfred Zaha, though only after the player raised it.

One reason bots are hard to root out is that they adapt their tactics by, for example, posing as genuine fans and making comments relevant to the club account they are targeting, as you can see below from the anti-Kroenke and pro-Cavani posts.

People who get scammed, or exposed to age-inappropriate content, are not the only victims of social media’s pornbot epidemic.

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These accounts often use photographs of real women, an invasion of privacy which can be distressing for victims, and difficult to eradicate once a set of photos starts being used and reused by multiple bots. The women who have their photos stolen include actresses and celebrities but also ordinary women who have their photos taken from their personal social media accounts and misused by scammers.

Even more disturbing possibilities are opening up because of technological advances. Wired magazine recently reported that at least 104,000 women have been targeted by a bot operation on the app Telegram which was used by people to create nude photographs of women — some of whom appear to be under the age of 18 — by using artificial intelligence to “remove” their clothing in photographs. Experts have warned that these sorts of “deepfakes” are only going to become more common in future as technology gets more sophisticated.

“This manipulated media leads to people’s photos being used to deceive people online without their permission or even their knowledge,” says Dance. “British legislation has not been updated to address this deepfake content, so these accounts have free reign to share this material.”

After The Athletic approached Instagram and all the clubs mentioned in this piece, many comments were removed and porn bot accounts deleted. A Facebook company spokesperson says: “Inauthentic activity is bad for the community and we continue to build on our technology to find and remove spammy accounts. This includes recent new measures which ask people to confirm who they are when we see a pattern of potential inauthentic behaviour.”

The Premier League’s biggest clubs are increasingly powerful megabrands, famous all around the world. Instagram and the other big social media firms are global megabrands too, on an even bigger scale than football clubs.

Both types of companies are secretive, and run a tight ship when it comes to their corporate identity and outward-facing brand.

But in the comments, things are getting increasingly out of control.