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We recently posted a thread about @MStenphen, a stolen valor account impersonating EUCOM deputy commander General Stephen Twitty. We ran across several more such accounts whilst perusing the followers of another account of interest (@WhytchesThyme.)
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
@MStenphen @ZellaQuixote We found eight additional stolen valor accounts, as well as several other bogus-looking accounts (including an Anthony Scaramucci impersonator.) Are there more fakes lurking among those accounts' followers and followees? 
@MStenphen @ZellaQuixote We ended up with 31415 total accounts by mapping the follow relationships of the initial set of fakes. 1663 (5.3%) look automated based on 24/7 schedule/use of automation services. Japanese accounts are rarer than they were among @MStenphen's followers.
@MStenphen @ZellaQuixote To look for more low-quality fakes, we narrowed the set of 31415 to accounts matching one of the following criteria:
- no tweets
- fewer than 20 tweets, tweets are in English or lack text
- fewer than 50 tweets, tweets are in English or lack text, first tweet is an image
- no tweets
- fewer than 20 tweets, tweets are in English or lack text
- fewer than 50 tweets, tweets are in English or lack text, first tweet is an image
@MStenphen @ZellaQuixote This left us with 1860 accounts. Although some are likely false positives, the resulting set has some suspicious traits from the get-go. First, gender imbalance in userpics: 82% use a female avatar vs 6.5% male (the remaining pics show no people or multiple people.)
@MStenphen @ZellaQuixote Many of these accounts use stolen photographs. (With 1860, we didn't check exhaustively, but the vast majority of the ones claiming to be ordinary people and providing a face pic were indeed using an image borrowed from elsewhere on the Internet.)
@MStenphen @ZellaQuixote A bit surprisingly, we didn't notice any stolen valor accounts beyond the original 8 in the full set. We did, however, discover a number of accounts with few or no tweets claiming to be one of two supposed Barclay's executives - 16 Aisha Elitas and 13 Lisa Beesons.
@MStenphen @ZellaQuixote We also ran into a variety of fake celebrity accounts. In addition to @AnthonyScaramu8 (the aforementioned fake Anthony Scaramucci) we found @PrinceH44076690, which seems to have forgotten that the prince it's impersonating is named Harry, not Henry. #YouHadOneJob
@MStenphen @ZellaQuixote @AnthonyScaramu8 @PrinceH44076690 One more for the road: @JulieLe12901463, a supposed $310M lottery winnner who of course decided to take to Twitter to give away her lucky infusion of cash in $50K increments to anyone who bothers to send a DM. Personally, we wouldn't hold our breath waiting for the check.
