7 High-Tech Twitter Users Who Fell For Phishing Scams

1 Dec 2009

Twitter’s default URL shortening service Bit.ly announced steps today to stop phishing and malware attacks from being passed around online through its service. If effective, the effort should help a whole lot of people save face and prevent those moments of panic when you’re afraid you may have lost access to your Twitter account forever.

Really, though, people who take tech seriously don’t fall for those kinds of things, right? Wrong! Below we offer the job titles of some of the most surprising people we’ve received phishing direct messages from over the last several months. It’s a pretty surprising list.

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May this serve as a memorial and a reminder that when new communication media emerge – even the most savvy people can get on board and fall for the oldest tricks in the book.

Remember also, this could happen to any of us (apparently, perhaps) and thus the old saying “there, but for the grace of the Fail Whale, go I.”

“I made $300 today with http://ifortune4u.com” – and assorted variations…

Bio: Market analyst following datacenters, energy efficiency, and blade servers.

That’s complicated stuff but probably pretty mechanical. No wonder a little human-engineering was able to overcome this person’s defenses.

Bio: Enterprise Comms Analyst

That’s Comms as in communications?

Bio: Industry analyst: enterprise communications [Different person, same analyst firm as the above]

Oops. Why are these analysts, some of whom charge up to $1000 per hour for their work, falling for a scam that promises relatively small sums of money?

Bio: Consultant in large scale data warehousing.

Looks like just a little bit of your data just got warehoused!

Bio: Strategy planning at [Giant European Firm] Enterprise Communications

How’s this for an enterprise strategy? Know a phishing scam when you see one.

Bio: Customer Interaction Analyst at [Giant Marketing Research and Analyst Firm] / Speech Reco and UI Geek / Trendspotter

Oh my…

Bio: an investor and co-founder of [common web 2.0 term].com; a founding partner and Vice-President in [big Web 1.0 company]…8 million page-views and 1 million unique visitors per month…with zero marketing budget.

Surely there were people pulling scams like this back when you were…building a website with 8m monthly pageviews…with zero marketing budget…

Want to brush up on your social networking skills, so you can stay off of lists like this? Check out Sarah Perez’s post from October How to Avoid Malware on Facebook and Twitter: 8 Best Practicies.

You can find the whole ReadWriteWeb team on Twitter here. You can follow us with the knowledge that we aren’t going to spam you with scammy Direct Messages – or at least if we do you can write a blog post teasing us about it.

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