Spam accounts.

I've been seeing a lot of user profiles created solely to advertise random things that have no relation to what this site is about, most are scams / viruses Is there an effective way to combat this rather than reporting each individual post?

The only way I know is ignoring them... Although once I saw a guy from India making an advertisement (I don't remember what it was about, a love guru or a thing like that), he created four or five threads only making the same propaganda, then I made a joke inside one of his threads writing a false ad in my native language and some days later he deleted it. Then it looked like I was spamming because my answer was the first on the thread. -_-

It's kind of like the prank calls to C-Span, you cannot really crack down on them until it is too late. The best way would be to report them and then have the site's admins find some kind of way to IP ban them from coming back.