Twitter – Scam, Spam & Security

Twitter used to be one of my favourite internet-based pastimes but recently I seriously lost interest.

This was, in part, due to becoming extremely busy with a variety of tasks and projects.

However, it is also due to the huge increase in spam, scams and the number of people just generally trying to take advantage of predictable human reaction.

For the most part, Twitter has been doing a great job of dealing with the less than desirable people who sign up for their service but you may still want to keep an eye out for the following -

When someone follows you on Twitter it is quite normal for your first instinct is to see who they are.

Before following them, or any links in their profile, check them out though.

If they are following a huge number of people (often close to the 2000 cap) whilst not having many follow them back then chances are they are just following people blindly which is a type of Twitter spam.

They are hoping that a few people will click on the link in their profile but this will often point to undesirable sites, such as those containing less than legal content or malware.

Twitter is, nonetheless, a great website for building up your social circle, and they do react quickly to people who are trying to scam their users so if you have any problems then do contact them.

This should lead to them investigating the potential culprit and possibly deleting them if they find anything untoward.

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