Courtesy of Florence Klein, Founder, SilverPlanet.com

The honeymoon’s over for Twitter, the comparatively new social networking service that has spent much of this year dealing with viruses, phishing attacks, spam, and other scams that are already old hat everywhere else.

The latest warning comes from the Better Business Bureau, which says that Twitter is now being used as a way to convince job hunters that they can make quick and easy money.

“Twitter is the newest bright shiny object online and a perfect hook for yet another work-at-home scheme,” Steve Cox, BBB spokesperson, said in a press release.

Like other scams, “Make Money with Twitter” schemes may sound risk-free but require extreme caution. One email picked up by the BBB stated: “Twitter Workers Needed ASAP, You're Hired! Make Extra Cash with Twitter; As Seen on USA Today, CNN, and ABC ... Apply Now!”

The email links to EasyTweetProfits.com, a company out of Surrey, England, which claims you can make $250 to $873 a day working at home with Twitter. The Web site offers a seven-day free trial of their instructional CD-ROM but wants $1.95 to cover shipping. Buried in the lengthy terms and conditions are the details that the trial begins on the day the CD is ordered, not when it is received. If you don’t cancel within seven days of signing up, you’ll be charged $47 every month, the BBB reports.
 
Phony testimonial blogs have been created to tout the success of the program. Make-money-on-twitter.com is one such blog, where the writer brags about making up to $5,000 a month posting links to Twitter. The blog also includes an image of the supposed check he received for posting links on Twitter, but the exact same photo of the check has been used countless times on other phony blogs for various suspect work-at-home jobs, the BBB said. The blog links to TwitterProfitHouse.com, which has basically the same information as EasyTweetProfits.com.

“These Web sites have not been up for very long, so if experience has taught us anything, we know that it’s only a matter of time before the complaints start coming in,” said Cox. “Work-at-home schemes are like a game of whack-a-mole, and new Web sites crop up practically every day.”

Fake Twitter blogs are also being blamed for a scam to try and steal passwords in late June. The tech blog Mashable reported that hundreds of tweets had gone out the morning of June 29 with the message “omg!! is it true what they wrote about you in their twit blog?” and linked to a subdomain of the site twittersblogs.com. The linked site looked exactly like Twitter’s home page, but if you typed in your username and password, it tweeted out the same message, and the scam spread. Things calmed down that day, but Mashable warned that scams like this can be reborn under new names after initially getting shut down.

In May, thousands of Twitter users encountered Twittercut, a Web site that promised to add thousands of followers to your account by just logging in with your Twitter user name and password, according to The Kim Komando Show. It turned out to be a scam. Victims had their accounts hijacked, and the accounts started tweeting spam to all of their followers. The tweet read, “OMG I just got over 1000 followers today from (Twittercut link).” Anyone who followed the link was a potential victim.

Also in May, Mashable sent out warnings not to click on a link to juste.ru, a video site that has spread thousands of spam links through Twitter. The messages read “Best video” followed by a link to juste.ru. Those who clicked the link reported their accounts were used to Tweet the link without their knowledge. Twitter put out a warning to avoid the links and said the problem was being worked on.

By mid-April, there had been several versions of the Mikeyy virus, which wasn’t especially dangerous or damaging, according to Earthlink, but still plagued Twitter.

In January, someone hacked in to the accounts of some of Twitter’s most popular users—like CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, the account for Fox News, as well as pop singer Britney Spears—and sent out offensive emails.

Regarding the BBB’s current warning, watch for these red flags when searching for a work-at-home job online:

• The work-at-home scheme claims that you can make lots of money with little effort and no experience.
• You have to pay money up front in order to be considered for the job or to receive more information.
• The exact same tweet touting the program is posted by many different Twitterers. The links in such tweets could lead you to scam sites or install malware onto your computer.