If you follow Lady Gaga on Twitter, then you were probably somewhat ecstatic earlier this week when Gaga went gaga and offered each of her 17 million followers a free Apple iPad 2. “Monsters, I’m giving away FREE iPad 2′s to each one of you,” she tweeted, “in the spirit of the holidays.”

That tweet came along with a bit.ly link where her followers could get their free iPad 2…er, sort of. In actuality, the link directed somewhere in the range of 7000 of Gaga’s followers to one of those spam sites where you think you’re getting a free iPad 2—except that you’re really just getting, well, spammed. And scammed. Take your pick. Fortunately, that tweet and link only stayed up for a little while before Gaga reassumed control of her account and took down the iPad 2 tweet. “Phew!” she tweeted. “The hacking is over! And just in time, I’m on my way to Japan! So excited to spend Xmastime with my TokyoMonsters.”

Lady Gaga wasn’t the only celebrity to get her account hacked by someone out there looking to move “free” iPad 2s, either. Both Nelly Furtado and Nicole Scherzinger have also been victims of the spammers, too. Which leads us to the point of this post: If you’re on Twitter and someone you don’t know or even a celebrity offers you a deal that is simply too good to be true, it probably is.

Now that spam emails have basically been brought under control and spam pop-ups are on their way out, spammers are doing everything they can to keep the spam going out. Twitter is the next logical step. And we fully expect other celebrities and those people out there with hundreds of thousands and millions of followers to become the targets of spammers. So do your part to eliminate them by ignoring them completely. Otherwise, there’s a good chance your account and computer could be hacked, too. And, unlike Lady Gaga, you probably don’t have a team of people who can help you get that problem fixed. Go and retweet that.

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