Will @Mueller_Moriah2 Buy @Twitter IPO Shares? Will @MrDeondre__Huel? How About @MsBernhard__Mer?

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Say hello to the fake Twitter account Evie Pacocha PhD (@Mueller_Moriah2) alias Ms. Darron Reichel (@MrDeondre__Huel) also known as Johnny Gibson DVM (@MsBernhard__Mer):



During another conversation with a friend — and, as usual, by “conversation” I mean me ranting like a madman — about this continuing problem, I made the point that only lax policy by Twitter could make this kind of bogus spam scam feasible.

These fake accounts are all generated by the same algorithmic software, so that they are formulaic and predictable, with the same photo avatars used over and over. Just scanning down the list of thousands of fake accounts now following me on Twitter, I’d estimate they’ve got about 300 or 400 different avatar photos. They’ve programmed a certain number of first and last names into the algorithm, with a few hundred aphoristic sayings (culled from WikiQuotes) used as profile slogans. Always, it’s “United States, [Insert Random State]” as location, and they’re following a couple dozen of the same Twitter accounts.

Because the formula is so obvious, you realize that the fake-account scammers don’t even really have to try very hard to evade whatever security screens Twitter has in place to prevent this kind of fraudulent abuse. It’s such a piece of cake to get through the screens that a simple algorithmic program can auto-generate fake counts by the thousands without anybody at Twitter even noticing!

If Twitter doesn’t take action — and by “take action,” of course I mean siccing the FBI on these spammers and putting a few of them in federal prison so as to put the fear of God into anyone else who would even be tempted to think about trying it again — I’m going to keep hammering them every day. How long have these miserable spambot merchants been doing these cheesy fake accounts and getting away with it? I don’t know, but the day somebody decided to target me for this plague of Twitter locusts was the beginning of the end for them.

 

TELL @TWITTER @SUPPORT TO STOP THE BOTS!

 

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53 comments

  5. This sort of thing has gone on forever in MMOs. It’s griefing and it’s very hard to stop. Online game producers have a great interest in deterring or stopping this behavior but it isn’t as easy as it seems.

  6. Stacey, it’s even easier for twitter to find them. The fake accounts are all being spawned from a limited set of ip addresses. It is guaranteed that twitter has those addresses, and they can identify with absolute certainty once one account spam account is identified.

    It would be the simplest rule in the world to implement. 4 or more accounts from the same address in 10 minutes, all accounts created from that address go to twitter gulag until verified

  9. Honestly? If I had my druthers Twitter would crawl off somewhere and die. No offense to all the conservatives that I respect that Tweet all the time. With a 146 (or whatever it is) characters the writer had best be darn funny. And most aren’t.

  13. Stacy, the issue you’re bumping up against is that computers aren’t human. We can intuit patterns in things with relative ease (in fact, in the purely materialistic sense, the very pattern-seeking nature of our brain is the foundation of our consciousness). For all our genius we’ve yet to make a computer that can intuitively perceive patterns the way we can. The best we’ve managed is brute force comparisons, and those take AGES, ass well as generating a ludicrous number of false positives.

    Brute-forcing the problem costs a lot. You either have to throw lots of processing power at it and thus have a high monetary cost, or you have to spend a lot of time doing it, which leads to a long wait, and usually a response so delayed that it’s not worth the effort because the problem has changed in the meantime.

    The alternatives are:

    hiring lots of people and using their intuitive pattern-seeking minds to seek out the problem – but this also costs a lot of money, and in all likelihood would make them unprofitable; or

    Letting their product- er, their _customers_ do the work for them, which has the cost of being unreliable and inconsistent, but that doesn’t show up as a red number on the balance sheet.

    Which of course leads to the situation we have now.

    It’s a no-win until someone can create software that thinks like a human. Or even a monkey. Until we invent software capable of intuiting patterns it won’t change.

  15. Exactly. People not in the computer arena – and too many in it – don’t realize how MANY infected/controlled machines are out there.

    Most invaders are smart enough not to directly attack the local system and draw notice, instead using the distributed IP to do things such as creating accounts/mass sending packets to swamp.

    Which is why it’s a hard issue. Not impossible, and Twitter could do a better job, IMO, because my sense is they’ve decided to punt that sort of concept to Twitter 2.0. Right now they’re more interested in total Twitter userbase/accounts, and if some of them are frauds, well…

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