How Many Have Unfollowed Me? Scam Switching from Facebook to Twitter. Spreading Virally on Twitter Now.

By Cesar Ortiz

Multiple sources are alerting that a known Facebook scam rogue application is now hitting Twitter. Users by the thousands are being victimized by these hackers whose only purpose is to trick you into offering to provide you with a list of followers who have unfollowed you. This list will never happen. The scam begins with a message from one of your real followers (because he or she was infected) that says:

“23 people have unfollowed me, find out how many have unfollowed you: [LINK] #aircontrollers  #Lindsay.  Find out how many have unfollowed you http/bit.ly Cstu (expand)”

Take a close look at the hash tags, they are currently real trending phrases on Twitter to make the scam message more realistic and trick users to click on the link. Users who click on the link will be presented with an official Twitter looking message saying that says:

 “Follow Finder232 application will like to access and update your data on Twitter. Allow Follow Finder232 access?” Up to this point the only harm to users will be that they have received a message from a rogue application that infected one of their followers.

Problems will seriously escalate with users who click the blue “Allow” button, Please assume that you are the user. As soon as the “Allow” option is clicked, a third party application will begin sending messages from you to all your Twitter followers and they in turn, will propagate the message to their own followers if they also click on the “Allow” blue button. The next phase of the scam relies on the desire to know who unfollowed you. A big very professional looking graphic with red background and yellow and white letters will show up and advise you that “you are ONE step from unlocking the content of this page” and will offer three links to access “an offer”. You then will be presented with the real intent of the whole scam, a survey questionnaire. This is where the hacker gets paid.

The big problem is that now users have granted permission to scammers to do whatever they please with their Twitter account. Some will not just take users to a survey, they may be taken to other hacker’s money making schemes. To clean up this mess, users should go to the Twitter website page, log-in and go to “Settings”, “Connections” and revoke the rights to the “Finder232acess” or a similar named application.