Half of Premier League players' Twitter followers are FAKE

A whopping 40% of Manchester City's Fernandinho's followers were revealed as spam or scam accounts too.

Gambling social media network Bettingexpert.com has drawn up data which has revealed that each individual Premier League player's followers are 25% bots or spam accounts.

False profiles are recognisable by their tendency to follow lots of people but they never — or rarely — tweet and have few followers themselves.

Celebrities including Justin Bieber were previously blasted for fake profiles.

The Canadian singer famously broke records with his follower count but later it emerged that 53% of his "Beliebers" were spam and scam diet accounts.

Similarly to Bieber, there is no suggestion the fake accounts have been created on purpose by the players or their managers, the betting website explained.

Director Thomas Høgenhaven said: "We can't tell if the players generated the fake followers themselves or someone did it to them.

"But there definitely are some suspicious outliers in the dataset."

UK politicians' social media presence has also been boosted by fakers.

Ammp3d last year revealed that 15% of Prime Minister David Cameron's Twitter fans were fake.

But I'm a Celeb contestant Nadine Dorries and former foreign secretary William Hague took shared top spot with 21%.

(dailystar.co.uk)