So,
Last night I was practicing my DJ’ing and at about 2AM a text message came into my phone from a phone number located in british columbia, but with no name associated with it. The text message said;
“Way to go dickwad, posting your phone number on facebook for all to see, you loser”
To which of course, I replied with
“Huh?”
And I immediately received this auto reply
“Welcome to Twilio SMS. For more information, see http://twilio.com/sms”
Maybe this is an old technique, but I’m not so sure. It looks to me like they’re scraping, or otherwise gathering information from Facebook users and spamming their cellphones. Using messages like this will surely invoke a response from most people, and apparently automatically sign them up to this Twilio service.
Brilliant? Kind of. Until they get caught.
Have you seen shit like this before?
Comments
Comment by Danielle Morrill on 2010-05-27 18:20:31 -0500
Hey Matt,
Thanks for pointing this out, Twilio is an SMS platform and we take spam messages like these very seriously. We want you to know that we have disabled this account for a violation of our terms of services, we do NOT tolerate unsolicited SMS spam. You have not been signed up for Twilio.com services, despite what this message says.
If you would like to follow up with any questions, or if you receive any other messages of this kind please email me at danielle (at) twilio (dot) com or at help@twilio.com
Sorry for the trouble, and thanks for the report!
Danielle @ Twilio
Comment by Danielle Morrill on 2010-05-27 18:30:32 -0500
By the way, sounds like it was probably one of your Facebook friends… see this post: http://bitchwhocodes.com/mt/?p=431
Comment by Matt on 2010-05-27 23:11:27 -0500
Hi Danielle,
Ha.
Thanks for the quick response on this, never was blaming you (it was obvious it was just someone using your service).
Also, cool about finding that blog post too, I’ll have to talk to her.
Something to keep in mind that can be abused regardless though.
Comment by Danielle Morrill on 2010-05-28 11:08:32 -0500
I agree, definitely something we have to be vigilant about so that text messaging will remain useful and not turn into a land of spam the way that email has. Just wanted to let you know we have your back, and we take this kind of usage seriously.
Cheers,
Danielle @ Twilio