Scam alert: Think before you tweet

About 100 accounts tweet around 300 bad links every hour and they're targeting Twitter users on smartphones.

In a release by Text 100 Singapore, smartphone users are cautioned to think before they click on an ‘interesting’ link on Twitter – it could be a scam.

Symantec Security Response has observed scammers taking advantage of Tweets in a way similar to how they rely on Internet search engines – they create Tweets that include keywords in them. Similar to how websites are designed to gain visibility through search engine optimization, scammers use Tweets that require less effort. For example, new Tweets appearing at the top in the search results list for the most recent Tweets.

At the time of writing, there were 100 accounts tweeting around 300 Tweets with bad links every hour. Twitter blocks suspected malware URLs and flags suspected harmful shortened URLs. However some users may be directed to sites such as the one below when clicking on the malicious links using smartphones. Users are typically informed that they have completed registration for a paid video service and ask that payment be made. These sites display information such as IP addresses, customer IDs, and browsers used to access the page to make the user believe that the site owner can track them down.