New Twitter SEO spam scam -protect your twitter name even if you don't want to use it

I came across a really interesting method of spamming Twitter on Friday, presumably for SEO benefits but it was intriguing so I thought I'd share. I came across it on a Twitter account that was setup under one of our client's name: @RomanOriginals.

We're currently in the process of claiming it from the spammer so here's a screenshot of how it looked when we found it:

 

So what's the scam and why's it interesting?

From what we can see, winslim.com has signed up to one of our client's regular email shots and is harvesting links from it. When an email goes out, they then tweet the subject line (this is usually less than 140 chars), "shorten" your url and throw it onto a twitter stream registered under the company's feed.

Although it appears to be a standard URL shortening service, if you look at the request/responses using Fiddler you will see that each one of the winslim.com links e.g. www .winslim.com/3CShT4H (I've popped a space in there to stop it linking to them) kicks the user over to a winslim.com product promotion page (winslim.com/winslim/SweetDeals/SweetDeals.jsp?d=d) which then redirects the user to the original url!

Although unscrupelous, I still think this is a very clever method and suspect we'll see more spammers doing it shortly so if you've not already registered your company's official Twitter username, it's worth doing it now!