If you’re following celebrities like Oprah, Michael Arrington, and Justin Timberlake you might find that folks are retweeting some odd stuff purportedly originally posted by the aforementioned celebrities.
For example, I was watching Greg Grunberg AKA Matt Parkman from Heroes (and the co-founder of Yowza) and noticed he was being re-tweeted with a vengeance. The tweet was simply ‘RT @greggrunberg guys watch”Transformers 2″ Movie Free online here [snip] Wal-Mart’ and it was sent out, in this case, by CarriCarrie012. A few clicks and we discover that young Carri is not “Goofy, intelligent, and determined!!!” as she claims in her bio but is actually a spambot.
The bot essentially takes a celebrity’s @ name and pretends to Tweet that they are supporting the viewing of pirated versions of major motion pictures for free, something someone like Grunberg would never condone (although I wouldn’t put it past Oprah).
When you visit the site you find it is essentially a phishing scam that eventually dumps out into an opt-in survey scam that keeps you going through ridiculous surveys until your “5 minutes” are up.
This brings up an interesting point about the implicit trust we put into Twitter and how it can easily be hijacked by those with nefarious intent. Also you really can’t watch any of those movies for free. I kept on filling out the survey until my clicking hand fell off and nothing happened. Don’t forget to Retweet this!
