Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Twitter Spam - GrantToolBox.com website - Grant Money Lost

If you receive a twitter or email leading to a landing page at a grantoolbox.com or secure.grantoolbox.com website, this is spam. Here is the Twitter spam I recently received from one of their affiliates.

1) Today, received a "twitter spam" that a member "Whynot12"was following me.

EMAIL MESSAGE
Subject: Whynot12 is now following you on Twitter!

Whynot12 (vqdsfZ) is now following your updates on Twitter.
Check out Whynot12's profile here:
http://twitter.com/vqdsfZ

You may follow Whynot12 as well by clicking on the "follow" button.

Best,
Twitter

2) When someone follows you on Twitter, I typically click the person's Twitter profile page to see if I know this person and see how many followers the person has. This person Whynot12 had over 800 followers, however, there most recent tweet looked like email spam I received. "Just applied for the new Obama stimulas grant package.

3) So I clicked through to the link, and it appeared to be an affiliate link, where the affiliate gets paid each time a user signs up or registers.
4) The Affiliate was https://secure.granttoolbox.com/



5) Ouch, look at their 245,000 monthly unique visitors per month on Quantcast.

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