The Twitter Phishing Scam

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So Planet Twitter is all a-tweeting about a phishing scam where someone sends you a Direct Message with a link to a Blogspot blog. If the scam artist had a clue, they’d use a randomised URL from a URL shortening service. There’d probably alternate the destination site of the scam too, right?

Hmm.. This scam is a great thing. It gets people to pull up their privacy screens and gets them to think about who and why they follow people on Twitter. Following someone on Twitter, grants them the privilege to send you private messages. Links or whatever.

The flat relationship between contacts on Twitter is a great thing. You can meet many interesting and fun people, but at the end of the day, use your cop-on before adding complete randomers that do not demonstrate much of a standing or contribute to the community. 

January 4th, 2009 at 12:16 am • Filed in Geekery



Comments

3 Comments to “The Twitter Phishing Scam”

  1. Joe Scanlon Says:
    January 4th, 2009 at 2:28 am

    nice post – message is simple – check people out a little before adding. cop on!



  2. Andrea Hill Says:
    January 4th, 2009 at 2:44 am

    The fact that the .. phisherman?.. didn’t use a URL shortener is really interesting to me. The blogspot URL was unique enough that people were able to easily warn others to stay away.

    I can’t decide if the use of the blogspot domain was smart (hopefully people would trust a standard link to a blog), or really dumb :)



  3. Lette Says:
    January 4th, 2009 at 12:58 pm

    I agree, im only on Twitter recently and iv noticed very odd people adding me as contacts, and most of it is advertising! its a strange one!



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