Marketing Firm Trap Plan Brags About Astroturfing Reddit With Fake 'War Robots' Player Posts

In November 2025 the video-game marketing agency Trap Plan provided one of the clearest documented admissions of Reddit astroturfing on record — by bragging about it. On its own website, CEO Pavel Beresnev published a case study titled 'How we promote War Robots: Frontiers on Reddit,' describing how the agency had 'strategically seeded' around 100 organic-style posts and comments across relevant communities, with reporting putting the count at more than 40 individual posts across major subreddits including r/pcmasterrace, r/PlayStation5, r/Mecha, and r/gaming.

The campaign was engineered to be indistinguishable from genuine community activity. According to the case study, each post was tailored to the tone and culture of its target subreddit, ranging from short clips and GIFs to 'I found this game…' discovery-style posts, screenshot threads, and casual discussion prompts about tactical mech combat. Beresnev wrote that 'most players didn't even realize they were part of a marketing effort,' framing the inauthenticity as a selling point rather than an admission of wrongdoing.

The posts had reportedly been live for months, accumulating genuine engagement from users and even moderators who treated them as authentic, before members of r/Games surfaced the case study and connected it to the earlier promotional threads. Once the boast was noticed, Trap Plan quietly deleted the article, and links to it returned 404 errors — an attempt to erase the evidence that itself became part of the story.

The incident drew coverage from Kotaku, PC Gamer, Notebookcheck, and Destructoid, all of which highlighted the rarity of a marketing firm openly documenting a covert campaign. Trap Plan later issued an apology, saying it understood the case study 'was a mistake' and apologizing to MY.GAMES and the War Robots: Frontiers team; Beresnev separately told reporters that the Reddit activity had been carried out 'independently' by the agency without the publisher's approval or knowledge.

For an archive of Reddit manipulation, the episode is valuable precisely because the perpetrator confirmed the mechanics: aged-feeling accounts, culturally tuned native-format content, and posts designed to pass as spontaneous fan discovery. It crystallized the gap between Reddit's reputation as a venue for 'authentic' opinion and the professionalized industry that exists to fake exactly that authenticity.