Yesterday I saw a news article that did a frankly amazing job of rendering the plight of a boyband member being attacked by a squirrel, and mentioned it on Twitter. Within seconds, I was on the receiving end of some spam telling me I’d won a prize:
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Twitter users were spammed in groups, with the above account holding off on providing a URL to click. Instead, curious Tweeters would instead choose to visit the above account then click the URL in the profile – onedgiveaway(dot)com.
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“Congratulations 1D Fan! Please vote for your favourite 1D member below. To say thanks accept a free gift worth over $500″
…mmm. Anyway, I went for Liam Payne on the basis that he might be related to Max and ended up with the following survey page located at 1dviptickets(dot)com:
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Unfortunately I came away with no free gift but lots of surveys (and a whole bunch of “Are you sure you want to go” style pop-ups while trying to leave the page) – nobody has “won” anything, it’s just some random fire-and-forget spam. At time of writing, the spam account is still active and blindfiring more messages to random Twitter users.
The squirrel pic was pretty awesome, though.
Christopher Boyd
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