Twitter May Be Generating Spam Account Income

Click Image to Read Interesting Spam Stats

Have you noticed that brand new Twitter spammer accounts don’t show any tweets?

I’ve been noticing that in spam accounts for a while now because that seems curious to me.

Then I noticed that #dominicanproblems was trending – and not just in Dallas Ft. Worth – for the entire United States and large numbers of individual U.S. cities  too.

There were an unusually large number of spam tweets promoting Visa.

So I did these screen captures.  This post is long because of the images, but you can quickly scroll through them all.

These show just some of the locations where @Dominicanproblems was trending:

Screen capture Oct 25, 2011 Trends Dallas-Ft.Worth

Screen Capture Twitter Trends Oct 25, 2011 United States

I decided to see where else #dominicanproblems was trending. While it isn’t trending in every U.S. city it IS trending in a lot of places where there would not be high populations of Dominicans.

Twitter Trends Atlanta Oct 25, 2011

Twitter Trends Baltimore 10/25/11

Twitter Trends Birmingham 10/25/11

Twitter Trends Charlotte Oct 25, 2011

Twitter Trends Las Vegas 10/25/11

Twitter Trends Phoenix 10/25/11

Twitter Trends Providence 10/25/11

Doesn’t that seem like a strange topic to be trending in so many places where there are not very many Dominicans? Add to that this interesting finding:

WHY are there no tweets visible in spammer’s profiles?

In the screen capture below you can see the spam tweet for a VISA gift card in the left side but there are no tweets in the profile at all. When a profile is full of spam tweets going to the same URL or promoting a specific offer repeatedly, people like me report them for spam.

If you remove the tweets so we can’t decide whether they are spammers or not we won’t report them.

Does anyone believe that the spammers have
found a way to keep their tweets from showing
up on Twitter in their profiles?

Why is there no tweet visible in this spammer's profile?

I did a series of sequential screen captures so you can tell I took one Twitter user after another in order. I did not jump around or selectively pick out only what I wanted you to see.

This next screen capture shows that the next tweet done by a regular user shows that she has tweets in both the left side showing the Twitter stream AND in her Twitter profile shown on the right side.

Here is another example of a regular Twitter account – again showing tweets on both the left and the right:

Here is another example of a spam account showing a tweet in the Twitter stream but none in the profile:

Spam Tweet in Thread; Shows 2 Tweets Sent but No Tweets in Profile

And another

While I suppose it is possible that spammers have found a way to send tweets into Twitter streams that do not appear in their profiles, it is more likely that Twitter is doing this internally as a way to generate income.

Tagged as: social media, spam, Twitter, twitter spam