Hot on the heels of recent action taken by Tumblr to combat spammers, Tumblr users are currently a little bit annoyed by a curious spamrun called “The Twitter IQ Society”. Spam accounts are popping up all over the place that have no actual Tumblr blog to speak of; their homepage is merely a collection of images stitched together to look like this:
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Should you follow one of these users, this is what you’ll see in your dashboard:
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Nice! Clicking the text link or the “start the quiz” button on the spamblogs takes you to tumblriq(dot)com, which appears to be a fairly standard ad serving website. Most of the time you’ll see an IQ test asking you for mobile phone numbers and subscriptions ($9.99 to $19.99 per month for this? I think you failed the test):
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We’ve also been taken to a splash for the Cupid(dot)com dating site and generic iPhone offers. One Tumblr user ended up on a “Michael Jackson secret vault” – unfortunately our testing has so far been lacking in moonwalks.
Some users have also reported phishing and “script overlays” that hijack your own Tumblr and overlay it with the IQ test. However, all we’ve seen is generic adverts asking for money and our test Tumblr is (so far) IQ quiz free.
It seems Tumblr are aware of the problem:
they do know about the influx of spam regarding this, and that they have locked all accounts where this is coming from. He also says they are working on ways to stop future spamming attacks like this.
At time of writing, there are still accounts out there asking you to join the “Tumblr IQ Society”, so there’s clearly still a bit of work to do. If you see any of these spamblogs floating around, report them to Tumblr Support – a guaranteed way to pass the Tumblr IQ Test.
Christopher Boyd
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