Reputation on Q&A sites

This is out of the ordinary.

I am a Yahoo! Answers user who has been helped by Recuva and recommends it to others. On Y!A, we regularly have to contend with spammers who set up accounts to advertise shady sites, in this case targeting users wishing to recover deleted files.

The spammers from Asoftech (and Tenorshare to a smaller degree) in particular are quite abusive, using dozens of "sockpuppet" accounts to thumb up and vote for their own answers. Recently they have targeted answers that recommend Recuva and other decent titles, using the same accounts to vote our answers down. This can lead innocent people to mistrust Recuva, and be tricked into downloading software that teases them with results that they have to pay to actually recover. (Some of these questions might also be posted by "spam feeders", which eventually distorts search results.)

I feel it is well past time to ask for help here. The best way would be to find and report abusive answers, while also supporting those who use Recuva. (While you're there, why not also help answer questions you might be knowledgable about?) The spammers' accounts are kept private so their answers cannot be directly searched, but a search for questions about "data recovery" and related phrases usually proves worthwhile.

There is a community effort to eliminate accounts that operate solely for spam:

http://suggestions.yahoo.com/detail/?prop=answers&fid=248412

A quick Google search can help find abusive answers:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aanswers.yahoo.com%20asoftech&tbs=qdr:w