Symantec's Satnam Narang has discovered a scammer who managed to create and operate 750.000 Twitter accounts on his own.
The security researcher who discovered one man show spam managed to earn cash from advertisements and referrals to other websites.
Narang said a single con artist impersonated news outlets and celebrities throughout the past year, promoting a false weight loss product.
"One of the most interesting aspects of this spam operation is the techniques of maintaining and retrieving accounts in order to avoid Anti-Spam measures," Narang said in his research: Uncovering persistent dietary spam operation on ΤWitter (pdf).
“Since the beginning of 2014, a single person has conducted a huge business spammed Twitter for over a year using approximately 750.000 fake accounts on Twitter. "
Narang did not name the scammer, but said he had registered some accounts under his real name and through them, using a well-known Twitter bot, made the retweets.
Η scam αυτή αποτελείται από τρία είδη λογαριασμών που μιμούνταν μεγάλα εμπορικά signalthe. They used stolen tweets and avatars, and were full of fake followers – or mockingbirds, parrots and eggs in Symantec's terminology.
Big media like TMZ, MTV, Yahoo! and Beeb were some of the Mockingbird accounts, while there were dozens of celebrities and random photos of attractive women on parrot accounts in an attempt to obtain real followers from the fraudster. As Symantec points out, the spam account that uses attractive women's photos is too old but unfortunately still works.
