There’s currently a number of “Twitter Verified” style accounts posting to Twitter, asking users to “Retweet to become verified”, or posting up peculiar minigames along the lines of “The last person to RT this Tweet becomes verified”. It’s all rather odd, and shows no sign of slowing down.
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At this point, we’ve seen the following accounts posting similar content:
- VerifiedTwiiter (notice the “ii”)
- PersonalVerify
- nextverified
- requestverified
- openverified
- verifiedartist
- privateverified
- diewhilelaughin
freeverify seems to be unrelated, with the last Tweet appearing back in August (humorously, it also mentions “we have not been verified as it takes 1 to 3 months to be totally verified”. It takes up to 3 months for Twitter to verify itself?)
Along with asking for Retweets, some of the accounts seem to be looking for recently verified individuals, then sending them a Tweet to say “you’re verified” shortly afterwards. By doing so, it would appear to anybody looking on that they had indeed just verified somebody.
Example: Shauna Case (I’ve no idea who she is, but anyway) proclaims loudly to the world that she is freshly verified, and no more than a few minutes later this appears:
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At this point, there’s no indication of what these accounts are leading up to (if anything). It could be a bit of harmless fun, a social media experiment in identity or something a little more serious. None of the above accounts are linking to downloads, surveys, suspicious Facebook pages or anything else at time of writing. The only external link we can see so far belongs to the below “Verification” account.
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The “Pay4Tweet” service claims that it allows users to both sell Tweets and text ads supplied by Tweets. There’s an ID number at the end of the URL – it’s possible whoever is behind the various Twitter accounts is going to attempt to make some money once the missing pieces are in place (whatever they might be).
Be aware that the only 100% genuine Twitter verification account at present would be this one, and you can most definitely verify that by hovering over the blue tick – something that all of the above accounts lack. For now, steer clear of anything asking you for Retweets with verification of your account as payment.
This one isn’t over yet…
GFI Labs Team
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