Amazon's online store-front has a social networking component to it, where people with accounts can create user and seller profiles to share their interests, what they are reading, listening to, selling, etc. For the most part, anytime a site allows user-driven content to be published on the web we have seen some kind of abuse (for example, LastFM, Google Code, Adobe Groups). Amazon's profiles are no different- most appear to "profile spam" advertise various pages on the adult sites:- adultmediareviews.com
- redspacetube.com
Google searches for both of the above domains show other sites hosting these similar "profile" spam advertisements. For example, Google Groups:
The redspacetube.com domain has been identified as redirecting users to Trojan malware (FakeAV) in the past (reference 1, reference 2). There are a lot of these Amazon profiles:
The Amazon profile abuse is not limited to porn and malware spam, but also includes pharma spam:
There are thousands of these profiles:
I have notified Amazon via their online abuse form and am in the process of trying to obtain a more direct contact for their abuse department.
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1 comment:
WOW that's horrible! I was just doing research on getting backlinks for your website, and I never even realized illegal terms could be accepted for profiles. I was trying to find out if we are allowed to make more than one profile, one for each site, or if there was a way to add them all into our personal account.
Now these examples are clearly abuse, and just wrong. But it makes me think,if I feel they are wrong for making these profiles then making multiple profiles in general may also be abuse, it's just not gross like this child porn stuff.
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