# How to Build a Faked Social Network on Top of Nostr for Fame and Profit
Say you want to build a social network on nostr to monetize your users by paying them small Zap amounts to do "tasks" that make you money. These tasks could be filling out surveys or gamifying something that does not need gamifying. This post will walk you through every step to ensure everything looks legit and even get you to the point where you can raise VC money or at least appease your current ones.
**Note:** This is a thought experiment and does not represent any honest company or group. I do not recommend building what I am about to describe. It would be lame and fraudulent (potentially). Use any of this at your own risk!
## How and Why
You want to entice non-technical users to do tasks to get "rewarded" in Sats (Zaps). Say a survey company will pay you $5 per user who fills out the survey. You can reward the user with 10,000 Sats; they might think that is great! Which is somewhere around $0.40
First, you would build your custom nostr client and create a walled garden nostr relay; only your users on your client can write events. Everyone can read from this relay, which is suitable for appearances.
Then, you create many fake or sockpuppet accounts on your client/relay combo. It can be done manually or with some simple scripts to generate engagement and repost others' notes. It would be a way of creating Daily Active Users (DAUs). After this step, it is just a process of repeating daily.
Zapvertising would be an easy and cheap way to gain traction and become a "Legend" on nostr for auto-zapping almost anyone—especially your users. One important thing would be not to allow users to add other relays in your custom client. You need these real users to be behooved to your client and relay.
Now, we can leverage LLMs to create posts, have the scripts or company users repost, and generate engagement chains to legitimize the notes.
After a few months, you can show your investors (or potential ones) nifty charts and graphs of DAUs and the levels of engagement and tasks "users" have done to show what a success it is. From the outside, it may come off as odd to general nostr users but most likely would slip through easily. Outside observers could not see the IPs used by clients using your custom client since that is on your client and relay, which you control. The only way oddness can be discovered by doing due diligence is by doing frequency and linguistics analysis of notes.
Most nostr users who want to see the protocol grow in usage would turn a blind eye to this since it fulfills their goals when all is said and done.
To further ensure this activity is not discovered, it could keep users from exporting their nsec from the custom client you create. Claim it is for the use case of keeping non-technical users from exposing their keys.
Another easy way to create more buzz is to Zap wash your personal, fake, and sockpuppet accounts to make it seem like a lot of zapping is happening.
## Profit
Now, you have a fully insulated social network that leverages a much larger open one in nostr. You can appease your investors and even raise another round with all the "proof" of engagement and usage. Attract real users to complete more surveys and do tasks you get the lion's share of money for doing. Most due diligence or investors already working with you would take your word for the vast usage and numbers in front of them. Worst case, delete the logs and hide the LLM/scripts from them when the time comes.
