Thread: African scammers

Tee - calm down...
There are no racist statements in these posts.
I run a site for only danish, swedish and norwegian people - is that racist?
Not all sites are meant to be international - i bet theres african sites for just africans, or even local nigerian sites for nigerians (or whatever other african country)
And when theres a problem with malicious users from a certain geographical area - best way to deal with it is to block access to the site from that area.
I'll tell you this much - if i ever get problems on any one of my sites (i do have international sites as well) from, lets just say germany, i will have no regrets about blocking all users from germany if i think the problem is big enough.

Edit*
And now i just noticed you posted a personal attack on my person. Try reading it again, then you might even understand the meaning of the post. If not, go back a step and read again. and again if need be... (get my point now?)

Oh and i dont run a dating site, and as a matter of fact i do run a joke site as well :P

I was challenged by kvik to answer how to get rid of the scammers.

<But maybe Tee have "the gold coin" to solve this problem>
http://www.modmysite.com/showpost.ph...70&postcount=5

Whereas I don't have the answer to that, I can share what I do to keep the scammers at bay on my site.

I run a semi free dating site, supported mostly by adsense and advertising. For members to be approved, they have to fax us a copy of their drivers license and their phone number - and I do call them back within 5 business days (on the sign up age, I specify the process takes between 2 and 14 business days). In lieu of both, they can make a paypal "sign up authentication" for only $4.95 - and get authenticated instantly. I used to charge $1 for this, and people had no problem paying, then I upped it to 4.95 and the response has been equally the same. Right now, I have a touch over 39K users (with $0 advertising). Between the sign up fee, and the adsense, I am doing ok.

How do I plan on making a little bit more money on my site? I plan on increasing the fee from 4.95 to 9.95 starting January 1st. All current members will be "grand fathered" at the 4.95 rate.

Going back to the semi free... All features on the site are free - the only charge is the "annual authentication fee". People have no problem paying the fee - except scammers. Once their is a "track" record on the scammer, they have no interest in signing up.

I also have a button on the header of ever page that says "Scam Alert" once a user hits this, it generates an email to support and I start snooping that users account and track whoever has been reported.

So, there is my story, it works for my site, however, be warned, it may not work for yours...

Te..

Originally Posted by romulus

In answer to your question about IP blocking try:
http://www.maxmind.com/

Professional and updated regularly. Cheapish if you only want countries...cities are dearer...but they also have free versions.

And with reference the the 419 scammers try:
http://www.419eater.com/

No I am not racist...I hate everyone equally LOL! But seriously, the Nigerian scammers are what I see the most on all my sites and in all my junk emails. These guys are serious, desperate criminals so don't be fooled to thinking otherwise!

Regards,
--
Rx

A good start - and easy to implement on a dedicated server - is installing APF (link) - it has a built in dshield ban list.

As for MaxMind - we have a MinFraud modification for Dophin / aeDating that has proven to be very effective.

If you don't want to use it with WorldCities - that is also possible.

There are many other ways to minimize this... but the two items mentioned above will go a long way towards this goal.

Smoge

Originally Posted by Tee

I run a semi free dating site, supported mostly by adsense and advertising. For members to be approved, they have to fax us a copy of their drivers license and their phone number - and I do call them back within 5 business days (on the sign up age, I specify the process takes between 2 and 14 business days).

It seems to be very hard and long to join your site, members dont get tired of this process and come back your website?

Flofou - you run a dedicated server I think - either install or upgrade your current APF for the dshield block list.

As for "block spammers" - I think in that thread on ModMySite, I posted the apf deny_hosts.rules entries.

Smoge