Reporting spam and phishing on Twitter

What is phishing?

Phishing scammers send fraudulent messages to a large number of people in an attempt to trick them into revealing private information, like a password. An email or website may be disguised to appear legitimate.

It can be difficult to recognize a spoofed email, since they may look very convincing or appear to come from a Twitter email address. You can check the headers of an email to find out more about the source of the message and you should be suspicious of new or unexpected emails. Twitter doesn’t send emails with attachments and will never ask you to provide your password via email, direct message or reply. Learn more here.

What is spam?

“Spam” refers to a variety of prohibited behaviors that violate the Twitter Rules. Spam can generally be described as unsolicited, repeated actions that negatively affect other people. This includes many forms of automated account interactions and behaviors, as well as attempts to mislead or deceive people. Behaviors that constitute “spamming” on Twitter will continue to evolve.

There is a list of examples of what constitutes “spamming” in the Twitter Rules. Here are some common tactics that spam accounts often use:

• Posting harmful links (including links to phishing or malware sites)
• Aggressive following behavior (mass following and mass unfollowing for attention)
• Abusing the reply or mention functions to post unwanted messages to accounts
• Creating multiple accounts (either manually or using automated tools)
• Posting repeatedly to trending topics to try to grab attention
• Repeatedly posting duplicate updates
• Posting links with unrelated Tweets

Learn more here.

Information provided by Twitter.