Fraud
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.
Groupon Needs To Be VERY Careful, Because The Sharks Are Circling (GRPN)
Groupon is bleeding in the water, and the sharks are circling.
On Friday, we learned that Groupon under reported the number of returns it had in Q4, and that the company had to revise its earnings.
Then Groupon’s auditor filed a “statement of material weakness,” basically telling the SEC it would not vouch for the company’s numbers.
Yesterday, the WSJ reported that the SEC is investigating the company.
That’s not all the company has to worry about.
Institutional investors put big money into Groupon’s IPO.
Since that day’s highs, the stock is down more that 50%. It tanked 16% yesterday alone.
If those institutions can blame somebody else for those losses and recoup any of their own investor’s money, they will.
That means if those investors catch even slight whiffs of fraud out of Groupon – and trust me, they are sniffing – the lawsuits and subpoenas will come in rapid succession.
Ever seen a shark frenzy?
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See Also:
- Groupon’s Andrew Mason: We Were ‘Toughened Up’ By Quiet Period
- Groupon Eyes Foursquare Territory And Acquires Location Database Startup, Hyperpublic
- San Francisco Puts Hackers To Work Fixing The Horribly Broken Taxi System
Digital Consigliere
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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Obama signs Safe Web Act into law, extends FTC power to combat online scam artists
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/04/obama-signs-safe-web-act-online-scammer/
See that guy? The one in the bubble? He’s probably up to no good. Thanks to President Obama, however, he’s going to have a much harder time duping innocent young ladies like the one also shown here. Per The Hill, the POTUS has just signed into law the Safe Web Act, which extends the Federal Trade Commission’s authority to “clamp down on Internet fraud and online scammers based abroad.” In simpler terms, it enables the entity to share data about “cross-border online fraud with foreign law enforcement authorities” through September of 2020. According to an unnamed official within the FTC, the existing edition of this act has allowed it to conduct over 100 investigations into cross-border fraud and scam, but it’s unclear how much crime was stopped and how many people were needlessly annoyed. We kid, we kid.
Filed under: Internet
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Via: The Next Web
Source: The Hill
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