I got Busted on Twitter

All of my twitter followers received earlier today a DM from me giving out iPADs for free. Of course, the people who actually know me know that I wouldn’t give out iPADs, an FTTH connection maybe, but not iPADs.This was a spam message from those infamous sites luring you into giving your mobile phone and fill you up with SMS at 2 euros per turn!

Anyways, since my followers seem to be more intelligent than myself, they did not catch the bait. However, as I feel a bit responsible for those few who fell for it here’s a couple of things you could do about it:

1. The spammers asked you to allow them access to your twitter account. This permission was effectively used to spam your followers. To keep this from happening in the future, and because these guys are lamers you need to revoke the access granted. You can do that either 1) by changing the password on your twitter account (via @androulidakis) or 2) by going to the twitter’s settings panel, clicking connections and revoking the access of the application (via @xilouris). It should be on the top of the list, unless you’re in to allowing access to your twitter account from non-legitimate apps :-)

2. A better thing to do is to delete all the DMs you sent out. Twitter will delete the messages from both your and the recipient’s queue. This may be a bit hard if you have few hundreds or thousands of followers. There is no safe way to delete DMs in a bulk way in twitter. There are some apps claiming to /doing that but you might end up making things bad for your tweets history.

If this helps, feel free to forward it to others who got scammed too.

Thanks to all who came to me about it. Thanks for the jokes and the good intentions. It’s always easy to make a mistake!

Also posted on feedproxy.google.com