There's a new kind of Spammer on Twitter

Don't know if any of you picked this up but I've had a massive influx of followers that seem legit with the exception of a few new anomalies.

Here's how to pick up this new type of spam:

They never follow more than 180-odd people
They always post the same shortened URL in their tweets with varying messages

So, just look for the URL xurl.jp/elt and you can be sure they're a spammer.

Posted

3 comments

Jul 13, 2009

L. Simon said...

This shouldn't last long, at least. I assume these are being generated by a webapp somewhere, and updated by that. There is all kinds of datamining Twitter can do to root these guys out - starting with people who tweet the same url repeatedly.

Jul 15, 2009

MC said...

Another way to identify them is the user name.

Their 'name' will be 'FirstLast' (note the case), while their twitter id will be '(First)[a-z]a(Last)i'.

That is, their first name will be followed by a random character and then an 'a', and their last name will always be terminated with an 'i'.

Jul 15, 2009

Justin Hartman said...

Thanks for that MC, makes it simple to spot them out!

@justinhartman

There's a new kind of Spammer on Twitter

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