Did you get $384 richer yesterday?

By on September 24th, 2009 In Advice

If you were on Twitter yesterday you probably received a ridiculous message from someone in your network that went “hey, I made $384 yesterday. this website showed me how” –followed by a suspicious looking shortened URL.

I received several of these, and promptly contacted the senders, certain that this was some robotic message. ($384 was enough of a red flag for me.)

But apparently there has been more to this, with another message not involving money and the worm passed around the Twittersphere faster than you could say Phish! Which brings us to question:

  • How reliable is microblogging that’s totally dependent on one provider?
  • How vulnerable (and dumb) are we who click on links from  a trusted source?
  • Is it a signal that we may be abusing shortened URLs?
  • Could we ‘publishers’ quickly become unreliable curators/middlemen?

I have to say I am a big user of URL shorteners, not just in tweets but in documents and posts. So I will have to pay closer attention to how I use them in future.  URL shorteners are not just risky business but some have said they defeat the very architecture of the web.

This recent bit’o phishing (as the folks at Twitter put it) did not make any money rich, but creditability poor.

Comments

Matthew Dutile Says:
September 25th, 2009 at 3:34 pm

I actually got one of these from you! Ironic huh?

Get-rich-tweets and why we fall for them « Says:
September 28th, 2009 at 9:16 am

[...] whom I received the suspicious DMs with the shortened URL, and thought I was immune. A reader to my post at ValleyPRBlog confirmed that I too had taken the [...]

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