Twitter Spammers Get Clever

So I just noticed I have a new follower on Twitter. According to her profile, "Sherry" lives in Wilmington, Delaware with her roomate Jen and two cats, Simon and Holden. One of her favorite movies is Walk the Line. And there's a link to find out more. Seems like a nice enough person; perhaps I'll follow back, I thought. But when you look at "Sherry's" profile, the tweets tell a different story...

Who's this Harold Shults, and why are all of Sherry's tweets actually retweets of this character?

By going to longurl.org you can copy and paste a shortened URL and find out where it leads, without clicking on it and putting your computer at risk for viruses and such. (Not that I'd have ever clicked on this one anyway, but this can be helpful for less obvious spammers.) Needless to say, "Sherry's" link leads to an adult dating website.

A thought just occurred to me: why isn't there more of this on Facebook? It's easy enough to set up fake profiles, I would think.

More on the "Mikey" Blog Hoax

There's an update at the Outsports Jock Talk Blog about the "Mikey" masquerade -- the blog by someone claiming to be a 17-year-old closeted high school hockey player but turned out to be a man in his 40s. (Here's the link to my previous post about this story.)

Jim Buzinski's article is about as thorough as it can be, considering that Outsports is essentially a two-man operation. There's no team of investigators, nor are there resources to devote to in-depth detective work. Be sure to read the article because my brief summary doesn't do it justice: "Mikey" is around 48 years old, lives in a suburb of Minneapolis, may be (or may have been) married and has profiles on two sex sites, including Manhunt. Even more worrisome, he seems to have created his "Mikey" persona in part based on actual high school players in the Minneapolis area and had pictures of at least one of these kids (and the kid's brother) on the blog server.

The whole thing finally unraveled because he fell for Jimmy, a 23-year-old Canadian, and the two developed an online relationship. It was Jimmy who caught "Mikey" in the lie.