dramatic increase

Mitt Romney Twitter Fraud – 117k Followers On A Weekend Day

Digital Forensic Analysis by Augustine Fou

The first graph shows search interest in “mitt romney” over the period of June 25 – July 24, 2012. There is no discernible lift in interest around July 21, according to Google Insights for Search

The second chart below was generated by Twitter Counter and shows a dramatic increase of nearly 117,000 followers in 1 day, when the average number of adds per day over the same period was usually a steady 7,800 per day.

Something is not kosher. The spike happened on a Saturday, July 21. Saturdays and Sundays are usually the worst days to tweet according to a study by FastCompany.

Many of the followers listed on Romney’s twitter page have ZERO tweets, ZERO followers, etc. (see screen shot)

See at the bottom an example of the proliferation of “service” which help users buy thousands of followers at a time.

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Tuesday, July 24th, 2012 analytics No Comments

How to Make $1,000 a Day on Pinterest

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5896926/this-man-makes-1000-a-day-on-pinterest

And you thought Pinterest was only useful for lonely pastry fantasy. This anonymous conman talked to the Daily Dot, and boy does he have an easy job: fooling Pinterest’s lonely materialists into clicking Amazon spam links. For money.

It works like this. Pinterest Spammer creates thousands of fake accounts, probably with regular breaks to stare into the mirror, bleary-eyed, and ask if this is really happening. Then he proceeds. Thousands more accounts. He won’t reveal his method, but let’s assume, for our sanity and his, that it’s automated. Then his spam accounts “repin” the same goddamn picture of boots or Christmas ornaments or sequined sock puppets, ad infinitum, rocketing each image to the top of the site’s popularity charts. When you click the thing, you’re delivered to This Guy’s Amazon account.

The terrifying part? People then proceed to buy the things they’ve clicked on. Enough to generate thousands:

As the days came my earnings increased and increased and increased. First week of doing this I made around $2,000 which was Feb. 20-29. I stepped my game up and changed the way I was doing some things, and I saw a dramatic increase in my earnings. Went up to $500-800 a day. Kept at it and for the past two weeks I have made over $1,000 a day with the highest earnings being around $1,900.

I fully expect next week’s earnings to be $2,000-2,500 a day. There are no guarantees in this business and it could all come crashing down soon. Not a matter of if, but when will it happen.

Think about what you did at work today, or think about the fact that you’re unemployed, and then think about this, and then punch a hole through a car. [Daily Dot]

Tags: amazon account, christmas ornaments, click, conman, day, dramatic increase, easy job, fake accounts, fantasy, fooling, Goddamn, materialists, Mirror, money, Pinterest, popularity, popularity charts, sock puppets, spammer, top

Wednesday, March 28th, 2012 display advertising, news No Comments

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.

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