Tag: twitter

Twitter Pay for Followers

On Twitter, there are lots of profiles that advertise they will get you thousands of extra Twitter followers for a fee.

There are also such ads on spam mail, websites etc.

This is quite legal of course, although disliked by Twitter.

e.g. CheapFollowersLikes.org – offers several packages including 100 Twitter followers for $15 or 2,500 followers for $50.

There are numerous other such people making similar offers.

It may seem a good idea to get more followers the quick way – more people will see your blog or website, may attract even more followers and if you’re selling something then you need to get followers.

BUT, people who find your Twitter feed, like it for whatever reason and decide to follow you are the people you need and are likely candidates to work with you, buy from you etc.

However, if you buy followers, then these are very likely to be

  1. Robot accounts i.e. no real person
  2. Fake accounts setup simply to get paid for following
  3. Entirely useless to you as there isn’t a person there interested in you
  4. A problem for Twitter who may regard you as a spammer or criminal causing this problem

Get More Followers

If you want more followers, then the obvious starting point is to create more and better content that people will want to see and tell their friends about.

Twitter adverts –Twitter shows your selected posts to more people.  These people may, if your content is appealing, choose to follow you and you only pay Twitter for each new follower. No money wasted.

If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-wasters do let me know, by email.

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Twitter Work at Home Scam

There is a common scam on Twitter you receive either a direct message or see a tweet that claims to offer easy ways to make money on Twitter.

If you follow this up – it leads to an e-book containing lots of ways to make money with no outlay.

You may choose to buy the e-book and hope it will give you the means to make money from home with little time or effort.

There may be no book – just a simple scam, but quite often there is a book which the victim receives and it’s not what was expected.

The guide to making money does contain a list of ways to make money on Twitter but they are either unsuitable or impossible for the vast majority of readers.

e.g. “create an information product and sell it on twitter”, or ”offer services on Twitter then use the Fiverr website to get the work done for you cheaply then charge a higher price to the victim” or “Get businesses to sponsor you for making tweets”.

Plus, the scammer has your name, address and credit card details and may well sell that information to other criminals who will steal from you.

Twitter scam entices users with opportunities to make money from home by tweeting about other people’s products. Those who fall for the scam pay a small sign-up fee to get a

“The end user ends up forking out money to do this work and they pay money to some rogue company,”. “But once you’ve paid for the CD, they now have your credit card number, and they can just keep charging that card each month.”

That is exactly what they do. Many victims report that after having purchased the starter kit, they were charged a hidden membership fee of $50 USD or more every month thereafter. In most cases, the victims had no choice but to cancel their credit cards.

The bogus messages appear as both direct messages and regular Twitter updates that attempt to induce users into visiting fraudulent websites punting supposed opportunities to make thousands for little or no effort. The dodgy messages link to supposed news articles on the opportunity.

Cleverly these articles would appear to come from (often made-up) news outlets near a prospective mark’s geographical location.

If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-wasters do let me know, by email.

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Twitter Shock Messages

A recent scam uses the fear of public humiliation, to make people click without thinking.

This scam involves receiving a private message to your Twitter account.

The message often has the following sorts of wording, designed to cause shock:-

  • You have been filmed in suspicious activity
  • Is that really you in the picture?
  • What are you doing with her?
  • Isn’t she a bit young for you?
  • You were recorded
  • Why are you in this video clip?
  • How are you going to hide this video?

There is a link to click to see the supposed video.  If clicked, the victim sees a page with a video player and a message indicating an update to YouTube is needed before the video can be viewed.

But the supposed update is actually a virus instead, which will infect your device.

If you receive such a message, then you may want to carry out the following steps:-

  1. Block the sender from your Twitter account
  2. Send Twitter a report about the malware and /or threatening message.
  3. Delete the message

Sometimes, the scammers use an innocent persons Twitter account to send out the messages. If you find your account is being used for this purpose then you need to take immediate measures to reset your password and revoke connections to third-party applications. Also report the problem to Twitter so they don’t label you as a spammer.

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Twitter Fights Back Against Scammers

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Twitter is enormously successful, but this has meant that a whole community of people create and sell dummy Twitter accounts by the thousands, largely to scammers and spammers .

This is a problem for Twitter as they prohibit use of automation to create accounts and the selling of accounts.

Twitter is always looking for better ways to identify these dummy accounts before they are used for sending scams and spam messages.

A group of researchers approached Twitter asking for permission to purchase credentials from a variety of Twitter account merchants. They got their permission and spent $5,000 over ten months buying accounts from at least 27 different underground sellers.

This totalled some 121,000 Twitter accounts at prices from $10 to $200 per thousand.

When you crate a new Twitter account there are two barriers that should stop scammers but they don’t.

First is the Capcha –which is the picture containing numbers and you have to key in the numbers. Computers are very poor at doing these so it prevents an automatic system from making accounts. However, the scammer pay workshops in China, India or eastern Europe to solve the Capchas.

Second is the need for a valid email address but these can be created automatically on services such as Hotmail, so problem solved for the scammers.

The researchers bought a lot of Accounts from the merchants and identified key qualities that were consistently present. This then enabled the creation of profiles for each merchant.

Twitter then used those profiles to delete large numbers of dummy accounts that had been created.

As the merchants typically built up a bank of thousands of accounts before selling, they then hit problems as most of their accounts had become worthless.  The 27 merchants concerned lost a lot of money and their reputations.

The project was a big success.   However checks some months later showed that the merchants were changing their methods and the profiles no longer worked so well in identifying the dummy accounts.

It’s a constant battle for Twitter but they are fighting the good fight.