Twitter Verify Scam: BEWARE Twitter Verification Account Phishiing Scam
It was around 1am, I was just about to nod off, but my phone beeped one more time and I decided to check it in bed. Just barely awake, my eyes opened wide and I jumped out of bed with excitement!
The subject line of the email said: “Twitter Verified Account @WhenInManila”
In case you’re not familiar, the Twitter verification check mark on your Twitter accounts is one that cannot be bought or acquired in any other way, except for Twitter themselves to say that: “Hey, this account is legit! They’re pretty big and have lots of people impersonating them, so we need to let the public know which account is the legitimate one” – something like that. So they verify the one official Katy Perry Twitter account, or the one official NBA account, or whatever big brand or name.
In a sense, getting a verified Twitter account also became a status symbol for online people.
So upon seeing that subject line for a possible Twitter verification, I jumped out of bed at 1am, hopped on my laptop and started to email back Twitter a huge virtual hug and my thanks. I was too excited and just half awake to think anything else of this.
I said to them:
Oh wow! That sounds so cool!
Please let me know what you need from me to confirm this.Hope you guys would open an office in the Philippines soon as the people here LOVE you! =)
Then I hit: SEND.
The very second I sent the email, I noticed a funny thing. it sent it to a GMAIL account. Immediately I thought, why would Twitter have an @gmail.com account? So then, with crisp eye boogers still in, I re-looked at the email address and also noticed that the email address was from TvvitterVerified@gmail.com….. the Twitter was spelled with two letter v’s to look like a w.
OMG! What a waste of a perfectly good night’s sleep!
So just wanted to warn you all out there of this. I was used to the spam and phishing emails from Nigerian Princes and Kings, as well as the dead relative scam emails from the UK, or the lost friend with lost passport hacked email scams, but this was new for me and was definitely something I wasn’t prepared for.
I went back to sleep, and the next morning they wrote back asking for my full name and Twitter password to verify. Of course, I just ignored them now.
A-HOLES!
Please share to warn others to warn them.
