I just received an email from a friend. I thought. It reads:

Jonathon [Last name not important] wants you to join Yaari!
Is Jonathon your friend?
Yes No
Please respond or Jonathon might think you said no

I know a Jonathon, but he doesn’t go by “Jonathon”. So I was immediately suspicious. The email gives you two options: Yes or No. Clicking on either option will bring you to this page. There you’ll find a registration form.

I happened to look at the small print. I don’t trust anything anymore, but there are plenty of naive souls online that don’t bother checking, so… At any rate, the small print reads:

By registering for Yaari and agreeing to the Terms of Use, you authorize Yaari to send an email notification to all the contacts listed in the address book of the email address you provide during registration. The email will notify your friends that you have registered for Yaari and will encourage them to register for the site. Yaari will never store your email password or login to your email account without your consent. If you do not want Yaari to send an email notification to your email contacts, do not register for Yaari.

Now, the small print obviously says that they don’t store any information. HOWEVER, when you sign up you agree to allow them access to your email contact list. How do you suppose they get that information? They don’t ask for it. They just take it. They send in their little spy worms and take your information and then spam your friends and whoever else is on your contact list.

So, my advice is to not open an email if it is from Yaari. Just send it to the spam folder. Or, better yet, send it to your email provider as phishing. Because, really, that’s what they’re doing. They’re using the email to get to your private information to use for their nefarious gain. Don’t let it happen to you.

Yaari is a shady little startup trying to cash in on the popularity of social bookmarking sites, like Blog Catalog and MyBlogLog. Don’t fall for it.

Now, I’m off to send an apology to all my contacts.

Update:

Found more at Desicritics.org

Aran Gupta of Miles to Go was an unfortunate victim of Yaari. Aalaap.com explains how this is pulled off:

The next page was asking for my Gmail password so they can find and “match me up with my friends.” This is pretty common these days – they take your password, see who’s on the site, and sneakily send an email to everyone in your address book telling them that you’ve invited them. I usually skip this step, but this is where Yaari.com pissed me off. They had no “skip this step” link or button anywhere. I tried entering a rubbish password to see if they’d let me skip that step in the next page, but no. There’s no way to register on this site unless you give out your Yahoo/Hotmail/Gmail password. To the junta, entering the password seems to be the only way to proceed, so that’s what they do. And everyone gets spammed. Just like I did.