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: