Visit Lincs Twitter site hit by Viagra scam

Hundreds of social networkers awoke yesterday morning to find Visit Lincolnshire seemingly using more explicit methods of attracting visitors to the county.

A tweet had been sent out to Visit Lincolnshire's followers, in the early hours of the morning, saying "hey, i've been having better sex and longer with this here", followed by a direct link to a website selling herbal Viagra.

Rather than a new marketing campaign to increase tourism trade, Visit Lincolnshire, the official tourism board for the county, had fallen victim to a phishing scam set up by cyber criminals to sell products like Viagra, or even steal online identities.

Visit Lincolnshire was one of tens of thousands of Twitter account holders nationwide who were targeting by the scam.

Upon discovery of the obscene tweet, Visit Lincolnshire posted an apology for any offence which may have been caused, informing users of Twitter that their account had been hacked.

Chief Executive for Visit Lincolnshire, Penny Baker, reiterated the apology in a statement, and affirmed that precautions would be taking place to increase online security.

"We profusely apologise for any offence that may have been caused by the message posted on our Twitter account by an internet hacker over night," she said.

"We will be taking the necessary steps to ensure, as far as we can, it does not happen again.

"We are always looking at new and innovative ways to attract visitors to Lincolnshire, and you can keep up to date by following us at twitter.com/visitlincolnshr (yes, that's right we ran out of letters).

"But I can safely say this is not the route we'd normally go down."