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 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 it operation spam is the retention techniques and recoveryof accounts in order to avoid Anti-Spam measures, Narang reports 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.
This scam consisted of three types of accounts impersonating major brands. They were using stolen tweets and avatar, 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.