Jacob Morgan | Best-Selling Author, Speaker, & Futurist | Leadership | Future of Work | Employee Experience

The Twitter Attack on Jeremiah Owyang, Community Defense

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identity-fraud

Identity is always a problem with social networks, we have seen many people create fake accounts on social media, accounts that don’t belong to the “real” owners.  Most recently we saw someone take on the persona of the Dalai Lama, that account was quickly debunked.  Now, we are seeing Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang getting pummeled by multiple fake twitter accounts, here are just a few of them:

  • @jowayang
  • @jowbyang
  • @jowcyang
  • @jowdyang
  • @joweyang
  • @jowfyang
  • @jowgwang
  • @jowhyang
  • @jowiyang
  • @JowJYang

For those of you who are curious Jeremiah’s real twitter account is @jowyang.  Here are a whole bunch of fake twitter accounts you can indulge yourself with.  Social media scammers and exploiters are always going to exist, and they are always going to try to take advantage of you and me, that’s life.  Twitter however does an excellent job of removing fake twitter accounts once they are reported using their support portal.  Social media sites and platforms have a responsibility to protect their users from spam.  However, the community also has a responsibility to protect itself.  In fact, the community does an excellent job of protecting itself.

Once I sent out a message on twitter about Jeremiah’s fake accounts I received several responses from people who also informed Jeremiah of the fake accounts (and told me that Jeremiah had already reported this to twitter).

jeremiah fake twitter

jeremiah fake twitter

fake jowyang twitter

fake jeremiah owyang twitter

fake twitter account

Update: the above 2 screenshots came from @reportabuse, they have a team handling any spoofers/hackers/etc. so if you have a problem send them a note!

Jeremiah posted his thoughts on the twitter spoofer, but the most important line out of this whole post is,

“Thank you all for watching out for my brand, I appreciate each and every message”

let’s keep looking out for each other, we are our best defense.

Your thoughts?

11 thoughts on “The Twitter Attack on Jeremiah Owyang, Community Defense”

  2. jacob morgan

    hi lina, credit for what? i found out about the spoofing through someone else, and just noticed that you guys had a list of some of the spoof names. did you guys have something to do with detection, notification/etc? You had a whole team working on what? I'd be happy to give you credit, provided I knew what I was giving credit for. All I know is that you had a list of some of the spoof accounts, clue me in and tell me what you guys do and what you did for jeremiah.

  4. Josh Peters

    I think it's great that in less than an hour from when the first tweet went out from these things that Jeremiah knew, and everyone else was hopping on board to get the word out about the fakes. Seeing the Twitter community band together to stop this crap right from the get go was awesome, a spammer was stopped dead in it's tracks in less time than it takes to watch an episode of Hero's. That to me is one of the greatest strengths of the Twitter community.

  5. jacob morgan

    oh, i see what you're saying, you mean you can't see the account name on the screenshot? sorry about that, ill fix it

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