Sydney Pugh, a lifestyle influencer in Los Angeles, recently staged a fake ad for a local cafe, purchasing her own mug of coffee, photographing it, and adding a promotional caption carefully written in that particular style of ad speak anyone who spends a lot of time on Instagram will recognize. “Instead of [captioning] ‘I need coffee to get through the day,’ mine will say ‘I love Alfred’s coffee because of A, B, C,’” Pugh told me. “You see the same things over and over on actual sponsored posts, so it becomes really easy to emulate, even if you’re not getting paid.”

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When a local amusement park paid several bloggers to attend the venue and post about their experience there, Joshi, a fashion and lifestyle influencer, went on her own dime and posted promotional posts as if she were part of the bigger influencer campaign.

Taylor Evans took the fake-“sponcon” game one step further, once faking the entire purpose of a trip to Miami. Technically, she was just there on vacation, paying her own way for everything, but on Instagram she positioned it as an exclusive press trip. “I took a lot of pics at restaurants and posted ‘Thanks so much XYZ restaurant for the hospitality!’” she said. “You say it in a way that people could interpret it as you having an established relationship with that brand … The hope is that it’s perceived in a way that looks like there’s a reason you’re in a different city and state, not just enjoying a weekend vacation.”

a five year old model keeps commenting on my band's fake sponsored posts. welcome 2 the Internet — Justine Dorsey (@justinedorsey) January 23, 2017

Jason Wong, the founder of the false-eyelash company Doux Lashes, said he’s surprised at the levels to which aspiring influencers have gone to promote his brand for free. “Normally influencers did one post for one product,” he said. Now “we’ve seen influencers do two to three posts for one product. They want to have a continuous stream of content to make it seem like it’s sponsored.”

Monica Ahanonu, an illustrator and Instagram influencer with nearly 12,000 followers, said that fake ads have become so common that she’s not even sure who is sponsored and who is pretending. While the Federal Trade Commission recently ruled that paid advertisements must be disclosed, influencers regularly flout those guidelines. And there are no rules against people who aren’t paid captioning their photos to make them sound like paid disclosures. Ahanonu herself posted an Instagram recently featuring custom artwork promoting a Chanel cosmetics kit. She didn’t receive payment or any product in exchange, but her post would look right at home among other Chanel ads.

For the average consumer, things become blurry quickly. Many fashion influencers tag the brands they’re using in photos, whether the clothes were purchased, given to them for free, or are part of an ad campaign. Lifestyle blogging is all about seamlessly monetizing your good taste and consumer choices, which means it can be near-impossible for laypeople to tell if an influencer genuinely loves a product, is being paid to talk about it, or just wants to be paid to talk about it.