Over the weekend I noticed that after I posted a couple of tweets I got some new followers on Twitter. Nothing strange in that you might think, but when I checked out their profiles it became clear that all was not as it seemed.

The tweets in question were about my redundancy and the followers were clearly commercial organisation trying to sell me something. The first one appeared to be someone called Laura Spawn – an odd name, but possibly a name. However, when I checked the user name was VirtualVocation. The second didn’t even try – it was just from “someone” called CreditCardDebt. This morning I spotted that I had a reply from TRUSSELL38 inviting me to a web site for “work at home legit jobs”. Hmm, I don’t think I’ll be following that link.

This phenomenon is not limited to jobs and finance. I posted a couple of tweets about Derren Brown (Enigma – an excellent show as always) and this morning I have a new follower – Jake Shannon. However, checking his profile reveals his user name is scientificmind and there no updates and this in his bio – “Hypnosis, Meta-Cognition, Mnemonics, and Expertise Acquisition.” All very dodgy.

While I can see why people and companies would do this – they have to find new customers and clients to survive it does make you aware that everything you post on-line (including blogs like this) is indexed and searched by someone trying to make money off you.

So it all goes to show, you can’t be too careful.

© 2009, Chris. All rights reserved. If you republish this post can you please link back to the original post.