Like all Internet media, Twitter is  prime feeding ground for marketers who use any and all means to attract victims to their scams.  Now, mind you I am treading a thin line here.  Consider Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) who uses feeds and re-posts to fuel his prolific output of Tweets (Note the pattern in the graph below. Guy posts the most tweets at Noon, 6 PM, and Midnight Eastern)

What is the difference between Guy and the thousands of falsified Twitter personae who randomly follow people?

Before diving into some of the fun ways that spammers abuse Twitter let me just clear up the differences.

Good Twitter Behavior (followed by Guy Kawasaki and the millions of legitimate Twitter users).

Using your real identity with real photo.

Bio is truthful and links to a web resource that you own or are associated with.

Informative posts. Links to things you find interesting are great.

Personal posts. Show that you are real. Having a bad day? Kids running you ragged?  Something great happened at work?  All good stuff.

Now here are some of the techniques spammers are using on Twitter.

One of the best ways to acquire followers is to follow other people. In my experience about 25% of Twitterers will “follow back”, many of them use tools like socialtoo.com to do so automatically.    If a spammer wanted to match Guy Kawasaki’s number of followers he would have to follow 160,000 people.

One of the primary ways to identify a spammer is that they follow you and then unfollow you. They have to do that because Twitter imposes restraints on the ratio of follows to followers.  Use FriendorFollow.com to determine who you are following that is not following you back. You will find some suspicious sounding names like @Candy01, @Candy05, @Candy07. (Whoever that was has been successfully eradicated by Twitter).

Of course a spammer would have to trick people into thinking he was legitimate or worth following. This is where a pretty face comes in handy. Look at the profile of RileyNicole001. This is what RileyNicole001 looks like:

But click on the image in “her” profile and you see that this spammer has just grabbed an image from an online dating site. An image that is meant to attract…men!

All of RileyNicole001’s 20 posts were made over the last week. They all link to termlifeinsurance2.com What is going on?  termlifeinsurance2.com is a carefully crafted site that looks like a blog. It’s content was generated by this site: http://www.a1-articledirectory.com/ and this site: http://www.articlesphere.com/ The whole point of the RileyNicole001 operation?  To increase Google search result performance because Google still treats Tweets as legit.  Oh, and if one Twitter ID works why not try two?  Look at http://twitter.com/GabrielleJenna That ID also pushes links to the same site.

And a couple more:

http://twitter.com/AmitolaAyita002

http://twitter.com/FalaNatalie

http://twitter.com/MariaMakayla

http://twitter.com/SaraRebecca00

http://twitter.com/ChimalisGrace

http://twitter.com/BrooklynMarissa

http://twitter.com/ChenoaKaniya002

http://twitter.com/KaylaKatherine0

http://twitter.com/HalonaKaniya001

http://twitter.com/ZoeAvery001

http://twitter.com/MadelineRebecca

http://twitter.com/AponiEyota

http://twitter.com/CASSEYBEULA00

http://twitter.com/MelanieClaire00

Sixteen in all. Is this malicious?  The real target is Google’s search algorythm after all. The cost to a  person that follows the Twitter links is no more than their time.  This falls pretty low on the scale of bad online behavior.  The greater risk is that Twitter’s reputation will be damaged if they do not do a good job of policing their polity.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 at 2:36 pm and is filed under CyberCrime, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.