Twitter Impersonator
May 13th, 2010 Brian Herzog
A funny thing happened to me on Twitter - someone started impersonating me.
What? I'm not famous. I know there's more than one person with my name, so I wasn't too surprised to see another Brian Herzog start following me. But when I clicked into the profile to see read their tweets, it turned out that someone had duplicated my account. Their username was @syuhaedah, but were using my name, the same bio line and same location - the only difference was their website was a tinyurl (which I never clicked, but was able to preview).
It kind of freaked me out, so here are the steps I took:
- Click the "report as spam" link in the email from Twitter you get when someone starts following you
- Read their Privacy Violations and How to Report Spam pages
- Found Twitter's Impersonation Policy and opened a ticket to report it
Within a few hours I got a follow-up response from Twitter, and by the next day that account had been suspended. I feel bad bringing the hammer down like that, but it definitely felt like a spambot or other violation of both me and Twitter.
And how bizarre - I can see when someone sets up a fake Barack Obama or Conan O'Brien Twitter account, but me? So, be careful with both your own identity and that of your organizations.
I got lucky in that this account started following me, or else I may have never known about it. I guess I'll start to periodically use Twitter's Find People and Advanced Search (with operators) to check for this sort of thing.
