Brazen Spammers Openly Marketing Twitter Spamming Software

I recently discovered two (there are probably more) websites openly marketing software designed to spam Twitter specifically. This isn’t a case of someone misusing a benign piece of software for nefarious purposes, these companies are openly marketing and selling their products and clearly explaining their use as spam tools.

TweetTornado claims to be, ‘Fully automated advertising software just for Twitter’. Users of the software will be able to automatically create ‘unlimited’ Twitter accounts and add followers with a click of a button. There is even a video on the site that explains the process and demonstrates that you don’t need to use a valid email address to sign up at Twitter, which is unfortunately the reason this software works right now. Hopefully Twitter will take this seriously and immediately add email confirmation prior to account validation.

The video goes on to recommend that you use a photo of a “hot chick” for your avatar because, “if you’re trying to get a lot of followers, having a hot chick for your picture helps out a lot”. Now I like hot chicks as much as the next guy, but the only followers you’re going to get are definitely not going to be what you would call targeted. Unless of course you’re selling sex vids or something.

The basic idea of TweetTornado is that you set up lots and lots of bogus Twitter accounts, create a simple bio with a link to your spamtastic piece of garbage website and then let the software start adding followers. There is even a feature that allows the software to target followers based on keywords.

Now you might be asking yourself, “Why would anyone follow an obvious spammer?” and that’s a very good question. The problem is that many of you are using apps that let you auto follow people so it doesn’t take long for a bot to generate a lot of followers. Of course the thing that the scumbags at TweetTornado don’t tell you is that auto-followers never see your Twitter profile and therefor will never see your spamilicious link either.

TweetTornado is currently selling for $100 a month and they claim they will always stay on top of any changes Twitter makes to ensure that the software always works, but hopefully that won’t be the case and all the unscrupulous people that are using it will lose more money than they made.

There are a couple simple things Twitter could do to make this software useless. First, and most important, as I mentioned, they should add email verification to the signup process. Second, they could watch for users that add followers at an unrealistically high rate or over a certain number per hour and flag those users for review.

The second program that is obviously designed to do nothing more than spam Twitter users is called TwitterHawk. The idea is this. You choose certain keywords that you want the software to search for and when it finds a tweet where someone used those words, it sends them an @reply with your spam message. One of the examples they use is targeting the word “coffee” and sending a tweet like, “@cracksh0t Have you seen our new Coffee Shop in Queens?” anytime someone uses that word.

The owner of TwitterHawk, Chris Duell, issued a press release in response to claims that his software was a spam-based service saying, “we do not in any way condone using TwitterHawk for aggressive SPAM based marketing tactics to harass or annoy people with advertising material on a regular basis”, but then goes on to say that he realizes that’s probably how the service will be used. C’mon, what else would you want to send prewritten @replies to complete strangers based on keywords for? To be helfpul? Give me a break.

I couldn’t find any information on the TwitterHawk website about costs, so right now it looks to be free. I’m sure once they feel they’ve gotten the word out they will start charging for it. They do require your Twitter password though so perhaps they have plans to use their users accounts to do their own spamming.

Hopefully Twitter will begin to address the fact that they are wide open for spammers and start implementing measures to slow them down but I also call on the Twitter community to get proactive and take steps to stop it themselves. Unfollow and then block anyone that is an obvious spammer and report the really aggressive ones by tweeting a message to @spam.