The Numbers Behind Eastern Lightning's Recruitment Strategy

Have you ever received spam messages from an obscure Christian church on Facebook? I did, and it led me down a rabbit hole into the mysterious world of Eastern Lightning. I started investigating Eastern Lightning, aka the Fellowship, aka The Church of the Almighty God, at the end of January. A cult-like, doomsday Christian church, I joined the religion on the 1st of February. It's been a long and gruelling month. I have lots to share, but for this week I'll try to analyse what I've managed to find out about their local membership.

When you join the church, you're put into Facebook chat groups which appear to be mostly filled with the admin accounts of long-standing church members. In the first group, level 1, you take in three meetings on consecutive nights; in level 2, it's about a week's worth of meetings; and then you finally join level 3, the final group.

During my investigation, I collected a few statistics about these admins' Facebook accounts. I traced the accounts of sixty-nine chat admins, and surprisingly found that 56% of the profiles were created just last year. The admin profiles look like the profiles of real people, with unique content posted to each account, but most of them have suspiciously similar posting patterns. Lots of friendly and happy-looking photos, with the majority of the posts being about God. Their posts are set to be publicly viewable with commenting allowed, etc. My educated guess is that many of these are likely public church profiles, and their owners also have alternative private Facebook accounts. I have also found evidence that some admins have multiple Facebook accounts. Could they be using fake accounts with female profiles to attract members, given that 93% of the admin accounts have been women? The Eastern Lightning religion may attract more women but, looking at the followers rather than the admins, the people who are interacting in the Facebook chat groups, the gender split is more balanced.

Here's a graph of when each of the admin accounts I tracked first posted something to Facebook - it's a good indicator of when the account was created. As you can see, most accounts have been made very recently, which is unusual as you'd expect people to have owned their Facebook account for many years by now.

Plenty of these admin accounts were linked to Facebook pages recently spamming people in New Zealand. And there are many Facebook pages! So far, I've tracked 109 of them linked to the religion, and, if I continued, I'm sure I could find a lot more. Between them the pages have a total of 350,000+ “likes”, and most of these pages list that they are from Auckland. 32% of these pages are known to be actively spamming people, and 66% of them were created this year. From what I've monitored, seven pages have been banned or hidden already - one of which had as many as 29,000 likes. It's obvious from comments like this one that many people are not happy with their tactics:

The following graph shows the creation date of these Facebook pages the church has been using to spam people in New Zealand - it's evident that there's been a real uptick recently:

Of the new converts, people who have recently joined the church, I was interested in who stayed around in each study group and who dropped away. In the Level 1 group, there were about 18 members of the group who were not admins or known church accounts. Six of these 18 people completed the Level 1 group, but on closer examination, three were clearly church accounts. Not only did these groups have admins as “fillers” to make them look busier than they were, but they also had “filler” followers - another deceitful tool in their toolbox. The Level 2 group had around 24 non-church members, of which only five saw it through to the end. Only two of those people were subsequently added to the Level 3 group I was put in. And only one of those stayed for any length of time; the other joined for just one meeting, and then left the group 16 days later. These groups don't seem to be growing in numbers very quickly, but it's hard to say for sure as one of the church's tactics is to split people into multiple groups, and connect those groups' audio calls to each other for the fellowship meetings.

The way that this religion recruits its new members breaks so many Facebook rules that I reckon, if I reported them, they would likely be shut down by Facebook - or at least have many of their spamming pages and duplicated profiles banned. I guess this will probably be my parting shot, when I either leave or I'm kicked out.