Her Satnam Narang Symantec, discovered a fraudster who managed to create and operate 750.000 accounts on his own Twitter.
The security researcher who discovered one man show spam managed to earn cash from advertisements and referrals to other websites.
Narang stated that one and only impersonator impersonated newsgraphics agencies and celebrities throughout the past year promoting a fake 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, an individual has been running a huge spam operation on Twitter for over a year using about 750.000 fake accounts on Twitter. 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.
This scam consisted of three types of accounts impersonating major brands. They used stolen tweets and avatars, and they 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.
