Why would I say that? Of course, the title of this post is not an indictment on each and every athlete/celeb on the planet, but there are hundreds of examples that support the title. You know this! :) On to my thoughts….I was reminded of this very true slice of reality by an earlier episode that occurred from the Twitter account of a very prominent professional athlete (that doesn’t need to be named to get my point).

This particular athlete is not active on Twitter. That’s fine. There are no rules for social media usage. Self-proclaimed “guru’s” will have you believe that you MUST do things a certain way, but the rules are customizable and this entire space of social media is well within its infancy and still gaining a foothold on modern society across the world. Don’t believe the hype! The “rules” are still being written……Back to the matter at hand though…..So, this athlete’s account sends out a tweet about a product giveaway. You guessed it….the product is not important to this point either. Well, the tweet made mention that 3 prominent companies were involved in this “giveaway contest” and the fastest 20 responders would be eligible for the product giveaway in this contest. I *never* bite on these spam magnet ideas. I was curious this time though since this particular athlete had more than a month in between his last tweet and I considered this to be some sort of unique partnership for the product giveaway……maybe.

Well, I clicked on the link and put in a fake email address to see what would happen next. Sure enough, it went to another screen to ask for home address information and was even giving false information of the particular product and its color choices when I absolutely know that black is the ONLY color this particular product is available in. It was a bait for SPAM!!

One of three things happened with this pro athlete’s twitter account. #1- It was hacked and someone (a spammer) found an audience of well over 100K followers to capitalize on, #2- Someone in the athlete’s camp (who actually tweet’s for him; STUPID idea, btw) thought it was a good idea to use his name to work some spam scam for their own benefit and #3- The athlete knew 100% what he was doing and is a heartless jerk who is using his own name to fool people into giving their information under false pretenses.

I’m not sure what happened, but I do know the offending tweets were deleted minutes after they were sent out and with enough time to have mined several hundred addresses/names from silly people who really believed they were entering a legitimate contest because “athlete X” said it was a partnership with him and 3 major companies.

This bothers me in many ways, but the following are the two main ways: #1- “Reverse Robin Hood”. In other words, the celeb (synonymous w/pro athlete in this context) will steal from the poor to make themselves or some affiliate of theirs rich or even more rich. They will consistently throw crumbs at the disadvantaged and persuade them that they are on their side to then slap them in the face by convincing them to buy into their scam (of spam in this context) with the prospect of winning something for nothing…..It’s a true shame! This happens frequently because as a whole (there are certainly exceptions), the socio-economics of the poor lend themselves to more predatory practices by scam artists. You mix in the bells and whistles of technology and you have another aspect of the carrot on the stick. #2- Top tier athlete’s are corporations in and of themselves. They are not just individuals who happen to have signed multi-year contracts worth millions. They are people who have endorsement deals, family (immediate and extended) they are providing for and many times have unqualified “managers” in their camp that misguide them from Day 1, but their loyalties run so deep that they are clouded by the idea of having a person “on the outside” concern themselves with their affairs since they believe others are out to get them when the damage is being done from the inside out. We’ve all heard of “athlete X” filing for bankruptcy when they made several million dollars in a short period of time. I don’t believe each one of these people just burned through all of this money…..they had “help” spending it and when the money was gone, so was the entourage.

So, to conclude this episode, I think pro athletes/celebs should do their fan base a major favor and navigate their own social media profiles to some degree of responsibility OR entrust a qualified vendor to do this because it will avoid any affiliation to scam/spam artists and leave out any possibility of taking advantage of the poor or non-tech savvy person who happens to enjoy how this person does what they do.