Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Twitter is becoming one of the most popular Web 2.0 sites and a very effective way to keep in touch with other people and finding new friends, but it also become one of the main targets for spammers and hackers in general. For this reason the Twitter staff is becoming tighter in enforcing anti-spam rules and suspending accounts. Sometimes these rules change day by day, so you might end up having your account suspended because of somebody else’s actions.

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It is very easy to impersonate anybody while generating a tweet. Let’s say I want to create a spam message but I want to attribute it to you. I simply build a tweet that looks like this: “RT @yourtwittername spam text spam link” and send it from my account. People who read it will believe that the message was originally created by you and that I am simply re-tweeting it because I find it interesting. If anybody were to come to your account and look for the original message, they wouldn’t be able to find. But goes to all the work of checking it?

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Additionally the spammer will cover up his tracks by canceling the re-tweet message from his own account history after having sent it so nobody will be able to trace it back to him and Google won’t have the time to index it. Yet he will have obtained his result of spamming all the people who are following him, and using your Twitter name in doing so.

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I have personally observed this on my own Twitter account and the only remedy is to be on the watch. The danger here is of looking like a spammer while you are not and the fake Tweet could also contain a link to a site that has some kind of malicious software into it (like a virus). If this happens, Google picks you up as source of contagion, they report you to Twitter and Twitter suspends your account until the link with the virus is removed. So keep an eye on the @reply section of your account and change regularly the password to you account.

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Roberto Mazzoni