I regularly update this list of messages being sent from hijacked accounts.
Some people ask me: How do you know which messages are from hijacked accounts, and which are just from spammers?
Some hijacked accounts never check their incoming messages, don’t read their DMs, don’t read their @mentions, don’t check their account, they just keep tweeting spam messages put there by the hijacker. Many don’t have links to websites, or don’t have contact information on their websites that they do link to. So you can’t even easily let them know. Some have contact information, but don’t respond!
So all I have to do is check their tweets to see when there are new spam tweets going out from hijackers. By not paying attention, their account now belongs to whoever hijacked it.
You can see the occasional tweet that they are auto-posting from somewhere, mixed in with nothing but spam tweets from the bot that has hijacked their Twitter account. Since they don’t intentionally send any spam themselves, as soon as I see a new spam message, I check for other hijacked accounts tweeting the same thing.
And it had to happen because they did read a tweet once, and clicked the link in it, and were fooled by what came next and got hijacked. They have literally paid more attention to a tweet from a hijacker than from the people who are contacting them trying to let them know they have been hijacked.
Yes, this is really, really sad. I feel badly for these people. The Tweets posted by hijackers on their Twitter accounts make a mockery of them.
But what can you do for someone who never listens, never checks the work they put out?
Whether on Twitter or in real life, there isn’t much you can do for someone like that. So I use their errors to help warn others.
{ 1 trackback }