Warning: Twitter Spam Scam
May 4, 2008
This may not be new to twitter, but it is the first I have seen of it.
Twitter accounts are being used to feed adverts/links under false pretenses. The accounts are created with profile names of famous people (Namely Warren Buffet and Bill Gates) and are not in fact the real people, but rather a link feed.
They spread simply by following you in hopes you will be curious and follow them back. The problem is that there are in fact many legitimate famous people who are using twitter so you will need to use some discretion.
If you use twirl you can easily view a person’s profile (and recent tweets) without having to follow them first. The scammers appear to be one ad link after another.
It’s not clear to me if there is any security risk or not or whether this is simply an annoying link feed. It may be possible for them to monitor your tweets for information about you, though I doubt they are (yet) that sophisticated.
At any rate, I thought I would advise those of you within my reach that if a famous billionaire decides to follow you, it MIGHT not actually be the real person. Drats, eh?
Live well and tweet safely,
Ian
