It happens – @duncanriley puts bounty on Twitter spammers

Fancy some easy money? If you’ve the inside scoop on who’s been sharing Twitter passwords around then the Inquisitr’s Duncan Riley is the man for you.

At the start of the week the former TechCrunch writer threw together an odd but understandable blog post – Twitter needs to act urgently on direct message spam. What was odd about this post was that Duncan was annoyed that we was getting DMs from people he didn’t know. Except you can’t get DMs from people you don’t know. Twitter only lets you get DMs from people you follow.

After an email from Biz Stone, Duncan Riley’s blogged to say he didn’t know this (we might see shades of Ketchum here http://blog.brinkwire.com/en/143/first-impressions-and-ketchum-insights-from-cheeky_geeky-and-rachelakay/). That’s understandable. You often don’t know what you can’t miss.

There is a twist. Riley is sure he hadn’t followed any of these people. As the type of blogger who has to test the myriad of sites that hook into the Twitter platform Duncan Riley has no doubt given his password to various services (Twitter’s Oauth isn’t that old). It seems scarily possible that one of those services has been abusing their access to username & password data and may have been following accounts on @duncanriley‘s behalf.

There’s certainly evidence that odd things happen with Twitter followers. Just today David Cushman of Brando Social had to ask “Where did those 5000 people come from?” when his follower account nearly tripled over night. These mysterious followers vanished as quickly as they appeared.

Riley’s opened the bounty at just $100 for information on who’s leaking Twitter details (there’s an irony here after Twittergate; if you care to look for it) but we suspect that bounty will climb.