Tuesday, October 13, 2009

A possible Twitter Worm or Scam!

I got 4 email messages today saying that 4 people (whom i do not know) are following me on Twitter. Seems to me to be a possible twitter scam with a possibility that it might be a new worm.

These are my observations for now:
  1. All four accounts belong extremely good looking girls
  2. All seem to be from Mumbai, India.
  3. All have the same Bio line which says "I am smart and simple girl, wanting to make some good friends"
  4. All have about 800 followers and are following about 400 people.
  5. All have almost the same tweets which are a combination of marketing website links and some mundane tweets albeit in different order.
  6. All accounts were created on Oct 6th.
  7. The tweets are posted using a combination of API and Web with lots of them being from the web.API alludes to a script doing the posting.

Questions i have:
  1. How did they get so many people to follow their accounts in such a short time? Seems to me like some bug is being exploited. Or maybe people really fell into the beauty trap?

If anyone is interested these are the four twitter accounts
  • http://twitter.com/mariya_gonzales
  • http://twitter.com/pari_choudhary
  • http://twitter.com/mansi_joshi
  • http://twitter.com/janhavi_agarwal

More updates as i debug this further!