Fake RT replies are the latest menace to hit Twitter. We’ve already had advertising spam, porn spam, hacked accounts and random tweets from robots, and now we’ve got the latest twist – the fake RT reply.
In case you’ve not yet seen a fake RT reply (I hadn’t, till a couple of days ago), here’s how it works.
If you change your password regularly and are careful which applications you log into with it, hacking into your account and using it to send out advertising or malicious tweets is not that easy, so a spammer does the next best thing – harvests Twitter user names (quite easy, if you know how) and uses them to fake it.
How? By simply putting the user name, complete with “@”, into the update box and putting the letters RT in front of it. They’re then free to send whatever message, with whatever links, they like. It looks as if the original has come from you – and the first you know of it is when a copy lands in your Replies box!
If you find a fake RT reply in yours, don’t panic. (I did – I thought my account was being hacked, changed the password in a hurry, had a problem with the Twitter database and panicked worse, then accidentally locked myself out of TweetDeck, and caused myself sufficient inconvenience to satisfy a spammer’s wildest dreams!)
In one way, fake RT replies are GOOD news. A spammer who’s gained access to your account won’t waste time sending them; they’ll be too busy sending ORIGINAL tweets apparently from you. The fact they’re “only” sending fake RT replies means they haven’t had the chance to do that.
So why are fake RT replies important?
Because whatever’s going out in them will NOT be helpful to recipients… and they’ve got YOUR name on them.
That’s frustrating enough if your Twitter following is limited to a few friends you can quickly tweet and say you didn’t send the message. If you’re in business, with followers spanning different time zones, and the message goes out when you’re off-line, you’re in a living nightmare.
You may have heard the saying, “It takes 10,000 tweets to make your reputation… and only one to wreck it.” That’s all too true – and hard to take if the wrecking’s done by fake RT replies you haven’t had a hand in!
So, what’s the best way to handle fake RT replies?
- DON’T click any links in them. They may simply be irritating but essentially harmless advertising – but they can just as easily take you to a malware site which can download spyware or other harmful stuff that will compromise your internet security, ID and passwords without your knowledge. What does the sender of the fake RT replies want you to do? Click on the links. So do the opposite. Ignore them;
- If you’ve clicked on the link before you’ve thought about it, play safe by disconnecting your modem so that no information can be harvested by spybots, then run your spyware checker AND your virus checker;
- DO click on the sender’s name to visit their account, then click the Block button. You’ll see a message asking you to confirm the action. Click on Yes. One way Twitter identifies spammers is by the number of people blocking them. The more people block them, the faster they’re suspended;
- Go one step further, and report the sender to the Twitbroom spammer-busting service. Just start your message with @twitbroom, give the offender’s name (without the “@” at the beginning of the username), and add “sending fake RT replies”. Complete your message by adding the hashtag #twitspam, to make sure that as many people as possible will see your message, and hit Send. Your message will be sent to all @twitbroom’s followers, with a request to block the sender of the fake RT replies. Typically, the offender will be out of Twitter very quickly. (Please also start following @twitbroom – the more followers he has, the faster spammers are disposed of.);
- If you think your followers may have seen any of the fake RT replies, you might want to send a tweet and tell them that they haven’t come from you. If the sender only has a handful of followers then they should be the only ones at risk – but for all you know, some of your own followers might quite innocently be among them, and you don’t want to leave them open to a spyware attack, etc. A message saying you’ve discovered fake RT replies have been sent out in your name and warning any questionable links should be ignored might save someone on your list from a great deal of unpleasantness; and, very importantly…
- DON’T beat yourself up about it. You’re not to blame for someone else’s forgery, and if you take these simple steps to alert people to the existence of the fake RT replies, you’ll have done everything you can to put things right.
Finding someone’s hijacked your identity can be a very frightening experience… but, equally, it’s empowering to realize that you’ve come through it AND taken action to prevent it happening again. Senders of fake RT replies, like all the other types of spammers, can be dealt with – but only if their victims will fight back.
