I have a Twitter account that I rarely tweet from, I use it to follow a few people I am interested in. Suddenly, I am getting all these porn stars following me, two or three new ones per day. They all have unusual names, and they all have pornish tweets and links in their profiles. How did they find me, and should I be concerned?
You are just being “phished” on Twitter. Who knows why, but there are all sorts who will follow total strangers for whatever reason. I have a few myself. I’ve never sent a single tweet, but there are people out there following me none the less.
The same thing happened to me during my brief stint on MySpace. I rearranged my Top 5 to display a neat row of tanned, shapely, oiled, thong-clad butts.
Like Silenus says, they’re just trying to get you to click their links and give them money.
This happens to me all the time on Twitter. The best thing I’ve come up with is to make my twitter account private and only accept people I know and/or people who aren’t porn stars or spammers. SO annoying. I was slightly concerned that my name had got on some list or something, but not sure there is anything I can do about it.
I’ve had these invitations from hot babe names I don’t recognize too. I wondered what that was all about. Never thought dumbass friends were possibly the cause.
I don’t get these on FB (maybe just once or twice) but I get these kind of invites on Skype all the time. “Hi! I saw your profile and you look interesting so I thought maybe you’d like to chat sometime!”
Really. A young, attractive single woman thought a middle-aged, overweight, married man with kids looked interesting to talk to? I don’t think so sweetie.
Politicians and celebrities have been caught in the UK bumping up their followers by using bots to automate the following process. A cabinet minister was actually involved.
The celebrities do it because they can then say to advertisers that they can “reach” a large number of people, politicians do it because it makes them look popular/influential with voters, which can help with getting cabinet posts and such.
I suspect that the companies that provide this service, which offer reasonable rates (something like $1-5/1000 followers) use these twitter spam bots to both collect lists of twitter users who are likely to just follow anyone and also direct market their penis extension pills/phishing emails/tweets. Sorry for the over use of slashes.