I noticed a new phenomena on Twitter yesterday. I got email notifications from bogus account names that my Twitter account is being followed.

Obviously the first thing one does is checking what user is following you and the only message one sees is a commercial ad.

Here's what I got on my Gmail account:

Maybe Twitter's user account registration system is being "worked on" by hackers or someone was doing this manually, but this definitely is able to put some message and link through.

Maybe Twitter should implement reputation-based mechanisms with Report Spam buttons to their system just like ISPs do. Spammers are trying to appear at every possible place with eyeballs and Twitter definitely has a lot of them.

Did you receive any similar "follow" notifications?

Comments

You can report spam to twitter by following and sending a direct message to http://www.twitter.com/spam - this is managed by the twitter community spam killer ;) Works like a report spam button.

I've seen something similar, but not nearly as often - I assume people are spidering for certain keywords and following in order to get page views.

And despite the lack of a spam/abuse report mechanism on twitter pages, these accounts have tended to be taken down within a day or two of my receipt of the friend request. Perhaps Twitter looks for users who follow an unusually high number of other users, with a low rate of said users following them in return?

I am a heavy Twitter user. I have noticed a high amount of follower emails that lead to disabled accounts.Not sure how the follows are being sent if the account is down. I have just started to get spammers sending me to myspace pages full of adds etc

the community seems to be getting these rat bastards turned in very quickly and Twitter disabling their accounts.:)