The page would direct the hapless clicker to a random third-party website (also owned by Ciocoiu, who did not respond to a request for comment over the weekend) which pays him to generate clicks and sign-ups to those sites, which more often scream of illegitimacy and fakery.Īt least one of the campaigns on Ciocoiu's books includes several websites owned by Nautell Capital and Tralox Overseas, two companies based in Cyprus that may be one and the same - they were founded on the same day and share the same accountant. Then, the fake accounts would post a single tweet - a link to a page that promises to show nude photos. In the end, the scheme looked like little more than a cheap shot to promote half-baked dating sites that ask for money to sign up, even though the hapless few who do probably have almost zero chance of getting lucky.Īfter further investigation, we learned that a Romanian spammer, Laurentiu Ciocoiu (perhaps a pseudonym), is in part behind the recent uptick in these spam bots.Ĭiocoiu started earlier this year with his most recent campaign, setting up a complicated network of thousands of fake Twitter accounts that would almost always follow the same pattern: Each account would follow a few dozen legitimate accounts - such as high-profile, verified news publications and celebrities that are presented when the user first opens a Twitter account - and then fake accounts would follow the other fake accounts. We kept a close eye on a few dozen of these bots over the past week, all of which were created with the same pattern of username (a random name and a few numbers) and were created within the space of an hour or so. Without a peep from the company (a spokesperson did not respond to our request for comment last week) we set out to find out more on our own. They may not always seem like it, but they're there to post spam like links to busty blondes and even propaganda.Īnd while it's been steadily getting worse - Twitter doesn't seem to want to do anything about it. Everyone who uses Twitter - yourselves included - have a number of followers that are fake. It's almost an occupational hazard of using the microblogging site. Even our sister-site CNET was flooded with these new faceless, empty profiles. Something wasn't right - why would they follow us? We dug into it a bit further, and it wasn't just us - these fake followers were also pushing up the follower counts of our friends at The Verge, Ars Technica, and Wired. It was a stream of several hundreds of accounts with garbled usernames and a sea of empty profile pictures (which only until recently used to be the infamous, anonymous "egg."). hit the 400,000 follower mark on Twitter a joyous moment marked by me in a brief note to our senior editor who, among many things, runs the feed.
Last Monday was a great day for us in the office.
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