Tweeting on Twitter is quickly becoming the most popular ‘thing’ to do. Never heard of Twitter? It’s a free Internet service where you can post just about anything you want from what you’re doing now (e.g., “I’m eating macaroni and cheese”) to sharing links to interesting articles. It is also a useful tool for businesses and entrepreneurs. Ensure that your posts are short and sweet as you’re only allowed 140 characters per message. If you do use Twitter, there are some scams that you should be aware of.
Making easy, fast money from home is one Twitter scam. These scams tell you that you can earn money by marketing other people’s products to them. All you need to do is pay a small fee to sign up. Sounds believable, right? Once you sign-up, expect your credit card to be charged $40.00 a month in membership fees. There are real work-at-home jobs, but the scams fail to tell you about the membership fees or they try to hide this vital information. It can also be hard to cancel your membership or get a refund.
The Twitter phishing scam tricks users into sharing their personal information, such as passwords, social security numbers, and birth dates. Scammers set up a link that takes you to a fake Twitter sign-up page where you have to type in your password. Once they have your password, they can access your account and spread more scams quite easily. Avoid sharing your password with anyone and change it frequently.
If you want more followers to follow your tweets, there is a service out there that promises they can make that happen. How? This service identifies Twitter users who follow anyone who is following their tweets and targets users with the same interests as you. This is a Twitter scam. If you purchase this service, you could be held liable for sending Twitter spam and banned from Twitter. Give it time and wait for followers to follow you.
There is a Twitter scam that sends messages attached with a link that sound like they were written by one of your friends or followers. When you click on this link, you are directed to another web page where malware or spyware is installed. Avoid clicking on unfamiliar links and installing applications that you are unaware of.
Twitter performs regular checks when approving applications, but there are scams that attempt to access your information from the Twitter API if you give them permission to do so. Ensure that you avoid granting permission to access your Twitter account. There is an option in your Twitter settings to reject access to certain applications. It’s a good idea to turn this function on to protect yourself from this particular scam.
This is a quite helpful post as I use twitter very often. I would like to know how would you know which is the real way to earn money from home. What are the sites that aren’t scams?
It is difficult to make money with twitter. One way to earn money using twitter is to use affiliate links. Sign up as an affiliate for some product or service, and then post their link using twitter (hoping that someone will buy using that link). Of course you need to give them a reason to do it.
I actually never believed how these opportunities were great and stuff like that and I always had so many doubts. What I was really wondering about was how did they actually do it. I mean the whole process which you have described
People should really choose a more secure password, or change it up regularly. My former twitter account was hacked before and it tweeted a lot of stupid advertising.
Also, it’s best to be wary of ads that promise an easy way of making money online. If it’s too good to be true, it probably is. I believe one can earn decently through the internet but I also believe that comes from great effort and wise decisions.
I’m very cautious about links now since these scams had really deceived me in the past. Scams are very rampant nowadays, and they could infect you with destructive viruses or get something from you. Everyone should never believe these at all, because they thrive on easy believers.
They do thrive on easy believers. How could anyone go through with such a purchase… I am hoping at least a few people were able to cancel the charges on their credit cards to lessen the harm done. I would think anyone would cancel and not proceed any further when hearing about this “startup” fee. Makes me wonder.
Thanks for writing this Ive had trouble with twitter spam before. Most of these scams are easy to identify if you know what to look for but sometimes its harder. I hope more people read this to avoid anything happening to their accounts/computers
Glad I don’t use twitter, yet. Never get caught buy paying fees to get in kind of thing. It is usually too good to be true!
Do twitter accounts get spammed like email addresses? Seems like it is easy enough to reach me as it is nowadays…
I was not aware that there are so many Twitter scams. Yet it is not surprising, as many of these scams mimic email scams.
I am typically wary of clicking on links on Twitter unless they are from legitimate news sites or blogs or from public figures or people I know personally. But as you point out, even that is not a safeguard as Twitter accounts do get hacked.
This reminds me, it’s time to change my Twitter password again!
I’ve been scammed a couple of times on other social networking sites. Though I don’t use twitter much, but I’ll keep these things in my mind whenever I’m on twitter next time. Thanks for this article, it was really helpful to me.
I’ve been using twitter since 2009, however I mostly use it to stay up to date with the world and only have a total of 1.4K tweets.
Recently I heard about some websites which offer money to post some tweets, but it was obvious by their website it was run by some shady individuals and to my better judgment I decided not to use it.
This article really just reiterates what I originally thought, these websites are all most likely scams and it’s better to steer clear.
Wow! This was very interesting to know,I am very glad I have not tried any of these shady websites. These articles really help me steer clear of danger.
It is not very uncommon to see some people get their account compromised on Twitter. I’ve seen many instances of these scams especially the phishing webpages. I don’t know why people fall for all these shitty scams because I can always smell them from five miles away? But, it’s sad that not everyone are careful, or could easily detect scams. Although, I’ve taken it upon myself to always warn people I get scam links from(through DM) to change their password because their account has been compromised.
People can be careless if they don’t really use stuff much. I’m guilty of this but now that I’m using my Twitter, I don’t think I will fall into the same trap again. That said, it’s quite nice of you to inform people when these things happen to them.
Thank you so much. I got a tweet saying how I could make alot of money online, so I clicked it. The next day I noticed my computer was running super slow, now that’s not normal. (It’s a Gaming PC, it has 8 GB of RAM and it’s brand new!) So I thought something weird was going on. The next day I clicked the link and Google Chrome warned me that Malware was inserted into the page. I got a malware scanner and of course, I have 8 malware folders on my PC. I deleted them and now my PC is running as fast as it always was. Now you have to be really careful about these scams because I bet I had alot of malware on my old PC because it used to be fast and it got slow. So I bought a $700 PC because malware slowed my PC down.
I have fallen for these before. It’s a shame that you have to look out for them. I get these types of messages so often now. It’s pretty easy to fix but still a hassle. I wonder if twitter could put some sort of second step of verification before a password is changed.
The best method for stuff like this is the golden rule of free stuff: If it seems too good to be true, IT PROBABLY IS. I’ll never understand how people fall for these scams where they’re promised thousands of dollars for doing nothing and somehow fall for it. If the person paying you is using Twitter as their means of directing people and don’t even have a decent looking website, it’s probably moot.
Some people are just desperate and stupid. Desperate for money, maybe, and stupid in the sense that money is what guides them to fall for these scams. I remember awhile back that somebody had started a pyramid scheme on YouTube, and you’d see comments on every YouTube video on how to get rich quickly. People usually fall for fear tactics too, like chain emails.
Twitter is kind of like the historian of the social media. It’s archiving feature is, although far from the Google Takeout, avoids all the low-level details, and we can use our data for personal as well as building our small businesses. I recently received a digital package from business twitter, by clicking the #MktgKickstart Tool Kit, so I think Twitter understands how difficult it is to make money from tweets. Unfortunately, Twitter does not have a business guide to help avoid and deal with the scams related to apps and use of its APIs, so we know from history that it’s sort of like, out there. For visualization, though, Twitter’s data is a rich, vast area for exploration.