Updated 6:50 p.m. EDT with statement from Elke Wong, the chief operating officer of Madison Logic:

Madison Logic strives to maintain quality of leads for our advertisers.  We work with over 300 publishers in the B2B space ranging from large Fortune 500 media companies to smaller niche content sites. We employ an initial screening process before signing on new partners and continue to monitor performance over time.  Most publishers have standardized methods for advertiser distribution including, but not limited to contextual site placements, registration path, and email.

However, Madison Logic does not condone or allow any dishonest practices such as Spam-tweeting and we have taken the initiative to resolve this issue with CIOWhitepaper.

What do the following people have in common?

Jill Dawnsoll, Kerry Ohnes, Dakota Baylie, Ellanah Cailn, Heidi Illems, Mirinda Latel and Paige Decanso.

For one thing, they don’t appear to be real people at all — although their Twitter accounts are designed to look like they are. Not one of the individuals listed above was found on a routine, nationwide white-pages search. Not one of them was found in a search on Facebook, the world’s largest social network, with more than 600 million members. Google searches for the names produced few results, all of which appear to originate from the Twitter accounts themselves. (See “Heidi Illems” for example.)

Instead, these appear to be phony Twitter accounts, set up as part of a spam marketing campaign with the object of harvesting e-mail addresses and other personal information. This Twitter scam is an example of the lengths to which marketers will go in order to harvest valuable e-mail addresses, which can then be resold in bulk and used for mass mailings and other annoying commercial solicitations — or worse.

As Twitter grows like wildfire, spam is becoming an increasing problem for the service, and spam purveyors are using fake or disguised accounts, as well as increasingly sophisticated computer programs called “bots,” to try to evade Twitter’s terms of service. For example, whenever a hot new tech product like the iPad 2 is released, spammers track mentions of the product and follow or retweet the accounts.

Amy Vernon, a well-known social media expert who is VP of strategy at social media consultancy Hasai, told Wired.com that “it is exceedingly obvious that these are dummy accounts.”

“If this is an actual marketing effort on Twitter, it’s pretty bad,” Vernon said. “A lot of people throw around terms like ‘transparency’ and ‘authenticity,’ so they sound trite, but they’re important on social media.”

“It’s much better is to create one account, and build up a relationship on Twitter, or any other social media site or platform,” Vernon added. “But create a bunch of spam accounts with made-up people behind them? No one’s going to pay attention, and you’ll be lucky if they aren’t all deleted as spam within days.”

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