14 DAY TRIAL // Sunday evening UK TV celebrity Kirstie Allsopp had her Twitter account hijacked by spammers, who directed her almost 48 thousand followers to a scam page.
Kirstie Allsopp is a TV presenter for Channel 4, where she hosts several property-related programs like Location, Location, Location, Kirstie's Homemade Home or Relocation, Relocation.
She also frequently contributes articles on property development or interior design to magazines and participates in other TV shows.
On Sunday evening several messages from Allsopp's Twitter verified account, which is followed by over 47,700 users, advertised free iPads.
"OMG free ipad, witha train skin =D [url]" or "free ipads!!! [url]" are two of the rogue tweets posted in Ms. Allsopp's name.
"The links took unsuspecting fans to webpages which encouraged them to apply for free iPads by handing over personal information and signing up for scams that charged £4.50 per week," Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, explains.
The TV presenter was alerted of the compromise by her friends and came online to address the problem.
"Have gone in changed password, changed profile pic, deleted ipad tweets, all better," she tweeted following the incident.
Fortunately these "free iPad" scams are quite common on Twitter and other social networking websites and many users have learned to stay away from them.
Nevertheless this is a noteworthy incident because it outlines the dangers associated with someone trusted by a lot of people falling victim to ill-intentioned hackers.
And Kirstie Allsopp is just the last name on a long list of celebrities who had their Twitter accounts compromised and abused to spam or mislead their fans.
Last month we reported that hackers managed hijack the Twitter account of Guns N' Roses frontman Axl Rose and post a fake announcement about all of the band's upcoming concerts being canceled.