Yahoo Answers, Spam Haven

Spammers thrive on Yahoo answers, operating for months without interruption or interference. Take for example, the case of "Julia Nancy." The account associated with this name claims to be a 25 year old woman in Australia. Every single answer she posts and almost every question she's ever asked contains a link, sometimes disguised, to thinktarget.net, an advertising laden and highly unattractive personal web site. The site contains a handful of photos, a host of ads and sponsored search boxes.

"Her" answers are typically below par even for Yahoo Answers. She provides one or two lines followed by a link to thinktarget.net, often with an insistence that the answer can be found at her site.

The account was created on February 06, 2007. Despite the often random, rarely useful answers given, Julia is, as of this writing, a Level 4 user with 2,587 points. 14% of her answers have been voted as "Best Answer." I found this surprising at first, but soon realized her secret. Most of those "Best Answer" ratings appear to have come from questions where she was the ONLY respondent.

Her apparent strategy is simple and clever. First, find questions that are close to coming to a vote, but have gotten no answers, then provide something that vaguely resembles and answer, even if it's inaccurate and pathetic. If the person who asked the question has forgotten about the question, it will come to a vote. In the absence of any "No Best Answer" votes, even a single vote for the spam post could result in it getting a "Best Answer" rating.

If you're willing to create some dummy accounts and know how to use a proxy server, you can use one account to ask vague questions no one will answer. You can then use another account to answer the questions. All you need to do after that is vote your alternate account's answer as the "Best Answer." Over the space of a few days, this technique can be used to increase an account's level. The higher level also lets you ask, answer and vote on more questions a day, privileges vital to a Spammer.

Most of Julia's Spam is absurdly shameless. For example, she asked the following question:

Question:
Yahoo Inner Beauty?
click on this link thinktarget.net
and type "Yahoo Inner Beauty" and press enter
and click on top 1st result and see what happend (sic)........

Here are some samples of her answers. I've provided a portion of the question she was responding to for context:

Q: Starting a Yahoo Group?
Julia: Yes... I am work for you... contact me...

Q: I was a friendster user but have not been able to retrieve my profile. Have tried everything.?
Julia: what is the address of your profile?

Q: I just started a new group, How do I enhance my front page?
Julia: Put a attractive messages.. or beautifl(sic) LADY picture....

Q: How long until I get an answer for my membership in the freecycle?
Julia: very long

Q: Can I link my group with a flickr account?
Julia: Yes.. you can link with him...

In each of the samples above, Julia followed her one line reply with her URL.

A whois of thinktarget.net reveals the following:

Creation Date: 17-Apr-2007
Expiration Date: 17-Apr-2008

Domain servers in listed order:
ns10.creativeon.net
ns9.creativeon.net

Registrant:
Administrative Contact:
Technical Contact:
Billing Contact:
NA
ALI IMRAN (freelancer.services@gmail.com)
Mall Road
Karachi
Sindh,775200
PK
Tel. +302.7661500

The incoherent nature of the "Answers" suggest Julia is not a native English speaker. I've sent Julia messages through Yahoo asking about her activities, but gotten no response. A Google Maps search for Mall Road, Karachi, Sindh, PK reveals nothing, but if you drop "Mall Road" from the address, you do get a lovely satellite view of a city in Pakistan.

New posts have been coming from the user for months. As of 7-11-2007, the Profile URL results in an "Information could not be found" error from the Yahoo web site. However a search of the Yahoo Answers site reveals numerous questions and answers by Julia Nancy, almost all of them linking to her Spam site. What's more, a search for the Spam URL thinktarget.net reveals other profiles posting the same poorly written, unimaginative answers and questions. One of them is "Julia 2M" registered on June 27, 2007. All of Julia 2M's posts relate to Julia Nancy.

Julia Nancy and company are hardly alone. I found two accounts, "John" and "Eve" posting links to a page at signup-google-adsense.atspace.com, claiming it was the sign up page for Google Adsense. Far from being the Google Adsense sign up page, it's a Phishing site set up at the free web host atspace.com. Most of the Yahoo Answers posts consist of one account asking a question about Adsense or Blog advertising while the other account provided the URL. Both accounts were created in July, 2007 and if Julia Nancy is anything to go by, we can expect John and Eve to spend months Spamming Yahoo Answers. Reporting all of the problem posts as Spam resulted in the Profile page generating the same "Information could not be found" error page as Julia's account, but many posts are still intact.

The problem is not that these Spammers come to Yahoo answers, but that they are allowed to operate with impunity. Posting an offensive or sexually explicit answer gets your account suspended or deleted, but Spam appears to be a hands off issue.

I've reported the posts as Spam and, in the case of the Phishers, left posts warning of the phishing URL where relevant.

What will Yahoo do? So far, all they've done is remove three profile pages and a small percentage of the posts, leaving many Spam posts intact. One can only wonder what will happen if more people report links to thinktarget.net and signup-google-adsense.atspace.com as Spam.