A Plague of Twitter Spammers
In the past week or so I’ve noticed the rise of a new spammers’ tactic on Twitter, and unfortunately they’re using LGF to help them do it.
Whoever’s running this spam campaign is retweeting my posts about LGF articles and Pages, but changing the URLs to point to spam sites or (in some cases) phishing sites that will trigger a browser security alert.
The scam relies on the fact that URLs in Twitter posts are shortened, so you can’t immediately tell that the link takes you to evilspamsite.com instead of littlegreenfootballs.com. Instead you see a URL like: t.co.
Here are a few examples (out of dozens) of this deceptive tactic (but DO NOT CLICK on any of the links these spambots have posted!):
Abdul Hagen (soccew) on Twitter
Haywood Marion (q6gmerqu) on Twitter
Grady Bassett (l4gjohn) on Twitter
Igor Garcia (kidfoxzf) on Twitter
Boyce Askew (bg2kamikk) on Twitter
If you’re on Twitter, you can help by using the “Report as spam” option on their profile pages.
And if you’re suspicious of a shortened URL, you can expand it and see the real destination with LongURL.