The Russian operation to influence Americans through social media included an effort to persuade business owners to buy into a marketing campaign and turn over private information, an examination by The Wall Street Journal found.

The effort was fronted by Russian operatives posing as a savvy Los Angeles-based startup called Your Digital Face. The group recruited American business owners as customers, and for a monthly fee, promised to post snappy marketing content on the business owner’s social-media pages and score them thousands of new followers. Their main contact was a man who claimed to be named Yan Big Davis, the business owners told the Journal.