How to Avoid Twitter Phishing Scams

Lisa Larter

January 19, 2012

Read time: 2 mins

Post Summary

Oh no! I accidentally clicked on a link to a phishing site! Did it happen to you too?!?!

In all seriousness, it did NOT happen to me, and it did not accidentally happen to you either. In fact, you did it to yourself.

Recently, there has been a tremendous increase in the number of Twitter phishing scams. I can tell, because I have been the recipient of many direct messages telling me that people are saying terrible, horrible, awful, very bad things about me online. This type of thing is number one on my list of types of messages to ignore.

Don’t know what Phishing is? The short answer is YOU get tricked into clicking on a link and then, you essentially give up your user name and password and someone hijacks your account. Most often on Twitter they start to bombard your followers with more phishing links via direct messages in the attempt to hack more accounts.

I have seen countless examples on Twitter:

“You seen what this person is saying about you (some type of phishing link) terrible things.”

“OMG is this you in this video (some type of phishing link)?”

Typically there is some type of grammatical error, the link is always a shortened link, and most of the time (but not always) the messenger is someone you do not know.

Let me be clear: No one is talking about you in some blog post, they are not uploading scandalous photos of you, and you have not been caught in some video without your own knowledge.

Stop falling for these messages when they end up in your inbox.

When curiosity really really gets to you and you just can’t resist checking into it….here is a way to tell if the message is real:

Send the person a direct message back and ask them if they really sent you that link. 99.9% of the time they will not reply because they have no idea their account has been hacked.