Question originally asked on Musing.io - Click here to see other answers
As far as I know, there are a lot of accounts that follow users in the hope of getting a follow back. One way to identify such accounts is to look at the ratio of number of followers/following, with a very low ratio being indicative of accounts that are doing so, usually with the help of a computer program.
As for why such accounts do this, we're delving into the realm of illicit activities here on Steemit and it's hard to say with this issue. My guess is one of the following 2:
Get a large number of followers and a large mvest count, then get post upvotes from @busy.org for low-quality posts. You make at least 20-30 cents per post per account every 12 hours, under current guidelines.
Set up a resteem bot business using these accounts. You can even lump these accounts together and claim to have a larger potential audience reach, despite there being a large amount of overlap between the followers of such accounts.