Stop Twitter Spam

Earlier today, TechCruch broke a story about Twitter user @johng77536 (account has been deleted). As of the writing of this blog post, this user is following 0 but has over 7,000 followers. And there is another account (account has now been deleted) linking to the same site (hotmoda.com) with over 9,000 followers.

TechCrunch speculates that this spammer is exploiting some vulnerability in the API. I’ll be following this closely and will post updates here if and when there are more details about how this happened.

Here is the link to block this user. Click here to block the account that is following over 9,000. These accounts have been deleted by Twitter.

Below is a very odd looking graph from TwitterCounter.com showing @johng77536 going from zero to over 7,000 followers in just one day.

Related:

• Get Satisfaction: Some nasty techniques used by Twitter spammers
• ComputerWorld: Teen uses worm to boost ratings on MySpace.com (October 2005)

More Coverage:

• Sean Percival: How Johng77536 Gamed Twitter

Update:

• As of about 7:00 pm PST on July 27 these accounts have been removed by Twitter