Not only am I a former customer of SocialSteeze, but I’ve also done some research on them as well. They are a huge scam operation. SocialSteeze is what some refer to as an “Instagram bot.” It doesn’t promote itself as one, but that’s because Instagram can be strict about their usage nowadays. You have to be careful about the automation that you choose, as some are better at respecting the community rules and guidelines than others. Now, as for my story… One of the reasons that I went with SocialSteeze is that their website indicated that they were run by human account managers. Their “How It Works” section implied that a “growth expert” would be overseeing my account for me. Upon setting it up, though, I quickly found out that wasn’t the case. I received a notification that there had been a suspicious login attempt from South America. After contacting SocialSteeze about it, they told me it was normal and that I needed to confirm that the login came from me. That was the first sign that something was wrong. Against my better judgment I decided to trust them and follow what they said. This proved to be a major mistake. Within no time my account was going absolutely haywire, performing a ridiculous amount of interactions per hour that was beyond any human capability. By the time that I learned about it and tried to stop it, I had already gotten a notice that my account had been reported and that I was banned. This solidified my decision to cancel the service and ask SocialSteeze for a refund. SocialSteeze’s refund page states that all cases are “reviewed and settled within 1-2 business days.” Yet, after submitting my request, I never heard back from them. At all. I tried for weeks afterward to contact them through their support email, but never got a reply back. After awhile I just had to chalk it up as a loss. That’s when things got much, MUCH weirder. It turned out their scam goes much deeper than just being a one-off bot service. While searching for a more legitimate replacement, I stumbled across another service called PhoenixSocial. It seemed like it had decent reviews, so I decided to check it out. I was left flabbergasted after I clicked the link to its home page: it literally was the same exact website as SocialSteeze. Right down to the stock image background, the logo font, the slogan, and all of the text. I immediately went to Google to see if I could find out more about the two services. What I discovered confirmed my growing suspicion. Both were owned by the same people, and they were part of an even larger network of similar services. Some of the others include: Magic Social, LikeSocial, Social10x, TweSocial, Social Envy, and Rise Social. There are two companies responsible for all of these scam services: Series Next Limited and Social Media Series Limited. They might as well be considered the same though, as they’re both run by the same group of scammers located in New Zealand. If you’re curious about how to tell if they own the service, just look at the PayPal checkout page. You will usually see either of those companies listed in the details. They avoid including their names on the websites, as people would catch onto their scam quicker and hold them responsible. Their operation extends far beyond the “growth” services too. It turned out that they also possess a network of review blogs and websites that falsely purport themselves to be “fair” and “unbiased.” This is blatantly untrue. All of these websites solely exist to promote Series Next Limited/Social Media Series Limited services. Meanwhile, all of their competitors are bashed and accused of being scams in order to hurt their sales. These dishonest review sites tend to clutter any search results, as they are geared towards taking advantage of Google’s algorithms. It gives consumers a warped perspective of their services, with the impression that their services are safe and widely approved by experts (which is a sham, as their “expert” bloggers are totally made-up personalities using stock images. Seriously.). The sites also seem to make the owners a lot of money from advertising, so they focus a lot of their energy on updating them. Here are some of the review sites that they currently own: JonathanSpire, The Small Business Blog, IGReviews, TrustAdvisor, Selected Best, etc. This is likely only a fraction of the ones out there at the moment. They’re also known to game and manipulate other review sites. Before I signed up for SocialSteeze, their TrustPilot page had an overwhelmingly “Great” average rating from hundreds of users. That’s because they were putting up those reviews themselves, with fake names and stolen profile images. However, I guess that TrustPilot has since caught on, as most of those reviews have been deleted and they are down to a “Poor” average rating. I’d even be careful with any answers that you received on here. Who knows how far they’ll go with their shady, deceitful tricks. It’s honestly galling how long they’ve been allowed to scam customers, and how massive their scheme has grown. Hopefully anybody reading this right now will know to avoid them in the future. I know I wish I had done a more thorough investigation on my part.