Pinterest spam promotes Acai Berry diet

Unless Pinterest gets serious about preventing spammers from abusing its systems, the problem is just going to get bigger and bigger.

Today, for instance, we’re seeing Pinterest posts promoting an “amazing weight loss product”.

The posts claim that the product is sponsored by Pinterest themselves, and doesn’t seem to care whether it uses an image of cute puppy, a woman’s skinny midriff, chicken parmesan bake, bikini-clad models or multi-coloured cocktails to promote a link to a diet website.

It’s not clear at this time whether the accounts of Pinterest users have been compromised by the spammers or whether the accounts have intentionally been set up by spammers to distribute their unwanted advertising messages.

But clearly this isn’t the kind of thing that Pinterest users joined the social network to see.

Here’s just a small selection of the many spammy posts on Pinterest right now:

WOW! An amazing new weight loss product sponsored by Pinterest! It worked…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

Found this article interesting? Follow Graham Cluley on Twitter or Mastodon to read more of the exclusive content we post.


Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.

What do you think? Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.