LOOKER SITES STAFF REQUEST/ETC

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Posted: Sat May 03, 2008 5:03 pm

Which one of you wits is AmBoKile? I just banned you on BL/LOOKER SITES because you abused my members. I'll tell baiter members to behave on site. I DO NOT WANT THE EXTRA WORK. If you are there and wish to come ONTO STAFF THEN FINE AND LET ME KNOW.

Posted: Sat May 03, 2008 7:53 pm

Began, are you positive that it is someone from here?

Posted: Sun May 04, 2008 6:00 pm

Called me by my on site here name. which I havn't discussed there.

Posted: Sun May 04, 2008 6:05 pm

Okay, I just wanted to be sure. Let's not have any flame wars. Will the responsible party please PM Began?

Posted: Sun May 04, 2008 7:09 pm

His eater name is a secret, in connection to these other sites....but he has openly posted the details here?? I'm even more confused...

Laughing

(No I am not playing at those sites.... )

Posted: Sun May 04, 2008 9:54 pm

IT ISN'T A FLAME. I was addressed directly using my 419e name on black looker. FOLLOWING THE MEMBER ABUSE AND A BAN I HAD "SHELOVES " USING PROXY IP , send a further message of profile abuse, and contact me stating some material about the ban. I think it is fair to state that if this is some 419e member pursuing some sort of game on the sites,then after spending at least two hours of my time on this, and multiple bans, they need to question themselves. WHILE YOU MAY ASK WHY IT IS SO, I HAVE A KILL CAPACITY AND ALLOWED IT FOR TRACKING. I have said my bit. I HAVE A REPUTABLE PROFILE ON THIS SITE I HOPE. Stepan, I need your 100% support, and I don't expect site members to give me less. It isn't baiting and trophies. I am hitting scammers recruiting potential victims.
(I am also still running my "lovedoctor" bait). Entirely due to being here , and supported at first by llamedos, who has become a dear internet mate, I have become a dangerous love scam baiter. And as for the one at the top, they will try too hard and make a fatal mistake. I AM VERY DANGEROUS AND TAKE A PRIDE IN IT.

Posted: Mon May 05, 2008 10:10 pm

Just to let anyone cruising by that I have been extremely active on mostly the PL site, but now with the other looker sites too.
I started back in early summer of last year and got to busting the oh so obvious scam profiles via blogs and forum posts. I was absolutely flamed by several members (that I suspect were plants by the previous scammer admin but no way to check that now as admin has a nasty tencency to delete previous blogs and posts during a "site maintenance" period) but I gave the b1tches a run for their money!
The new owner had obviously seen that certain members were trustworthy and therefore elevated us to the lofty position of staff and now we have the tools to make a clean sweep of the site and once the house is in order, to keep the riffraff out. I do think that the new owner may have been a bit naive at first as to just how many scammers were based on the various sites, but slowly and surely we are weeding them out. A "free site" is going to have it's share of problems - same goes for a paid membership site too, so it will never be perfect no matter how hard we work, but as with 419eater, it's a labor of love to inform and educate the general public and waste the precious cyber cafe time of the scammers.
Maybe I should ask the site owner to send me some cashews - I always said I'd work for peanuts!
Join us if you can - I have the same avatar and go by the name of Milagro.

Posted: Mon May 05, 2008 10:41 pm

Began Steele wrote:

IT ISN'T A FLAME. I was addressed directly using my 419e name on black looker.

I understand that, I am just stopping any flame wars from anyone before they begin. Very Happy

Posted: Tue May 06, 2008 12:08 am

Began Steele - I am willing to help you.

However I do have one reservation, you are in cahoots with anastasia-international, therefore I beg you to expunge them from your website.

Posted: Tue May 06, 2008 4:56 pm

I am not the boss but his deputy. The site gets per click revenue. This site exists because we donate and has no adverts, well only the ones that the site supports. I can't stop an advert unless it is offensive to good taste and decency. If people respond to Anastasia then that is a separate issue. The sites I am helping with could ban Nigerians out of hand. In spite of the dangers I won't let the staff do that, which is contrary to what my boss says.
I have to remember all the issues. To be honest I didn't know I could do something like this. However I have the job, paid in peanuts, by the way. All I got was some nice headphones to ring on skype-Bless him.

Posted: Tue May 06, 2008 9:37 pm

I never see any ads there guess my clicks don't count either then, that's a pity. Al least 477*4 is 1908 clicks missed Smile

Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 8:12 am

Here are some rough figures for you. Probably we are approaching 14,000 bans across the sites, and maybe have about 38,000 to go. It has taken a team of about 12 people working shifts for long hours to get that lot done in about 6 weeks. We have 24 hour time zone cover and have the front and back doors locked. Now we are dealing with the guests. New arrivals are often bringing us more IP from within, but some are lone operators. I have got the staff to keep their number statistics per IP because there is potential for some number crunching, and after all it is evidence of criminal activity which I don't want lost. So here is a view of how it goes.
Some IP when banned show them to be an isolated operator because an IP check brings no more results. However some IP produce a further associated list because they use different for sign up and log in. So for example I take one banned profile using the IP 41.204.224.10 and also 196.29.212.66 . The generated number for the search brings 27 and 107 fresh profiles, which it follows are also banned . However the first 27 is giving me an extra 20 odd fresh IP which have to be searched and gawd knows how many those will generate. The 107 looks horrendous! It's about 8 pages and I expect to generate another 60 IP from that one. My previous run from a single IP was lower numbers and gave me 1399 profiles banned. Just regard this as an investment portfolio. So some looks at the work involved. Set up a yahoo id/email. I guess that will take a few minutes ok so lets say 2 minutes to do that. Then you can't join with no picture. So off to Focus Hawaii to steal one, or though some have saved pics. Set up the profile is going to take 8 minutes and once in have a browse for victims. And a look around. Cut and paste some text and send off a varied number of mails to members individually so if you allow some don't bother and a lot do, then you are talking 30 minutes on the site. So each profile is 30 minutes work at least. So then we come along and remove it. But not only that, remove the 1000 profiles it has worked on. 500 hours work gone up in flames and if you want to be even more stingy over time, just call it 250 hours. 6 weeks work. So now we are taking out 38 000 profiles, with the ones we have- 48,000 profiles. 500 days scam work lost. The portfolio has gone.

Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 11:36 am

That's a lot of work and thank you for all of your time. Wink

Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 6:30 pm

Thank you Corona And for the general support from new wonderful staff. I have invented a new twist to entertain the new scammer members. What we do is we flag the profile with a ban, which makes it dead. We leave the IP ban off for now. The scammer then gets a closed for site maintenance notice. But when they view as guest they can browse for the profile and won't find it. So staff can wander off and do some more work elsewhere before going back to member browse. So confused scammer finds they can set up another profile and log on again. And they do. At which point the next profile vanishes before them! So all in all, they have just wasted an hour of victim abuse trying to get past looker staff. It becomes an unknown quantity . Now that is baiting ! Very Happy

I hope it amuses you lot! It is Began's Ball! By the way if members decide to join and have a look around with a fake profile , let me know on site. I can flag you as trusted and it will save staff and me having to check you each time .

Posted: Fri May 09, 2008 9:34 pm

Tasman says : "I wonder if he actually has a social responsibility..."

that one hurt

I assure you : I have a conscience and a social responsibility. Now please read the following :

(and Thanks Began Steele for sticking up for me.)

YES I am the new owner of the looker sites along with another similar site that caters to the Asian crowd. That site is nearly scammer free and has thousands of legitimate members. This is not a dating site : It is a social networking community for Asians. It is active and made the deal real.

As far as the other sites : Yes I knew there were scammers on board however; I had no idea there would be sooooo many. There really are a lot of legitimate members on all sites, but the scammers are rampid.

The looker sites are in google's bad books and the sites all-together earn less than $1 USD per day. I don't expect to earn much money from the looker sites but have an obligation to nominate people that have an interest in fighting scammers. Personally, these sites provide me with an excellent training ground to run any other dating site or social networking site. These are skills that I intend to take advantage of in my career.

Imagine the database of IP addresses we will create. I'm willing to share the IPs with anyone that asks for them - no charge.

As far as any doubt regarding new ownership :
OF COURSE my whois records are private. I don't want anybody in Nigeria knowing who I am or where I am. In the beginning, I was actually concerned for the safety of myself and my family.

I have spoken with two of the staff members and I have been there to help them whenever I was needed.
I upgraded the software to take advantage of new tools that help the staff tremendously.
I offered one person a staff position and that person unleashed 6 or 7 other members that would love to have staff privileges. I trusted this person and handed the KEYS to "Bloodsucker" while I was away on a family emergency. Bloodsucker still has full control of all looker sites only because I trust him 100%.
I do not reply to forums using "scammer grammar".

Now do you believe ?

Anyways .. just my 3 cents

Elite Baiter Joined: 11 Jul 2007 Posts: 1979

Hi Lookersites! Welcome to the eater.

I hope you do understand the skepticism that Began Steele has met with here. I personally have a trolling profile over at Profilelooker, that I have in the past picked up some pretty nasty scammers off of - for the express purpose of baiting them. Right now I have about $30K USD of fake checks plastered to my wall from one I got off that site.

I recently checked my baiter profile there and he/she (it's androgynous Pat from Saturday Night Live fame) no longer has any of the old scammers in the box. You obviously have been working overtime to clean that particular site up.

I wonder though, if you clean out all the scammers and then all the baiter/scammer bashers and then all the quiet baiters (like me), will there still be any memberships left?

I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors with the sites. I'm all for the success of honest, hard working people, who put their talents to good use making the net a better place.

Posted: Sat May 10, 2008 8:18 am

That's me ! However the sites are getting attacked and the new scammer traffic has risen in the past week. The staff are getting better at sniffing too so we are successful at getting rid of these. More dangerous are the sleepers and these are waking up more often. The problem is they are collecting the email addresses sent by potential victims and then they sleep again. I'm afraid getting rid of them then, is shutting the stable door. The only way is to make sure we can get them out of circulation as fast as possible. As I said above , new scammers we find online are having a hard time and we can effectively give them an extra hour on the site, and make life very difficult and confusing while they are on. We have some very strong team members from here now and we need it because some of our targets have considerable IT skills. I have got the staff balance weighted to GMT luckily, so we cover Nigerian working time.

Posted: Sun May 25, 2008 4:11 pm

We have seen a surge in attacks this past 10 days or so. Sleepers awake and sneak in to collect information and try to leave with no trace. They have switched their profile posting time to the 11pm to 2am GMT slot. I guess the idea is that they are trying to miss times when both UK and USA staff are watching. We have problems with AOL IP's and some of these come from using proxies, They know something about this, so we get some using a fake AOL email address. Mostly the proxies are easy to detect and they are often too clever in using them. We are actually having a 100% detection rate so far. We are taking out many IP chains with hundreds, or even an odd thousand plus related IP. And they are pretty pissed off with it!

Posted: Sat Jun 21, 2008 5:04 pm

Just FYI - all 4 sites are being decontaminated as we speak. New sign ups are subjected to email verification and also asked for their zipcode/postcode as part of a security check.
I'm personally spending many hours a week banning and deleting profiles (much to the chagrin of my 2 year old grandaughter who wonders why I am holed up in my bedroom on my PC) along with taking out known pics uploaded to the various sites (the usual f0cushawaii model pics) so they can't be used again. I said I would work for peanuts but I'm starting to get carpal tunnel syndrome in my delete button finger!
Thanks to all members here that have signed on l00ker sites and joined in the fight - it's really making a huge difference and although some of you don't think it's worth the effort, judging by the responses we get from genuine members, I think it is. I've been targetting these sites for a year now and the difference on the sites is startling. If I can get to one person and educate them about scams then that person will go on to educate others, and so on.

Posted: Sat Jun 21, 2008 5:36 pm

guymannemisis wrote:

New sign ups are subjected to email verification and also asked for their zipcode/postcode as part of a security check.

I really hate to be negative here, but email verification only confirms that the person did use that email address to open an account. It does not verify that they are not a scammer. How do you conduct a security check from a zip/postal code? Any zip or postal code can be entered; that does not verify that they are who they say they are, nor does it confirm a person's real location.

I'm a little skeptical of your methods to clean up scammers on your sites, but perhaps I am missing something. Confused

Posted: Sat Jun 21, 2008 6:05 pm

All that they can do via that method, I guess, is check the registration IP against the claimed postal code. Not very precise, because some normal people use computers away from home.....wireless ISP....etc.

Wink

Posted: Sat Jun 21, 2008 6:51 pm

sheboppe - My dilemma -

I am afraid with some of our lads, we are playing the waiting game with them - they will mess up.

Close monitoring of suspected problem creatures is a very good tool - I am afraid we are like the Stasi.

The more profiles we delete, the more attacks we get, they are not getting deterred by our presence. They are like the Borg, always adapting.

It's crying shame that some of members do not inform us if they hit a scammer, so I hope that we can encourage our members to report any possible scammers.

Me and the staff have watched with interest, both the movements of the scammer's and also how our members have react to their advances.

The members seem to be battle hardened to the scammers, OK we have a few Trailer Trash on the site - but on a whole the membership is growing but at a slow rate. But confidence amongst the members is getting better, as a scammers productive life span on the website, has been eradicated.

We are still in the IP Game, it's the best way to catch them - again we are confirming each IP is on a ban list - but some are very fresh. They have the tools to make IP's faster than you can make a Gmail account, they can also fool WHOIS on a regular basis. We are not dealing with some lad in internet cafe, the attacks are to quick and complex.

I have about another 5,000 confirmed scammers to delete of the website - which will bring the membership down to 23,000 - so I start again going through those members.

It's hard work at the moment - I work in the engine room, Beggan, Wicked Mojo are usually up deck, the other members are staff are really good - so we have a good mix, 419 eaters and also staff who used to working in forums.

We are a good team - We have problems but the trust amongst the staff is good - but we have had a couple of rouge staff members - but this is to be expected.

Again it's the nature of the beast we have free websites and that means free for Scammers, aswell.

Posted: Sat Jun 21, 2008 7:35 pm

Most love scammers follow a pattern. I would think that many of them would be obvious and recognizable.

Posted: Sat Jun 21, 2008 9:43 pm

We have one xxxsomething herexxx@yahoodle, and flower and chocolate avatar specialists. We may have tools, but sheer blind experience and memory makes a difference.
I can say that we have found two dedicated but fake "anti scammers", working within our looker community and across many sites and taken them out. They proved to have Nigerian origins. One is on Tagged and came across as staff by invite. Eventually caught out, first by Bill and then by Guymann. Then again by the inspiration and talents of other staff. We have no idea of the damage but suspect that ones we had found as sleepers, and not removed due to a site delete glitch, were quietly unbanned. The other one was on PL, probably a long term email harvester, and very dangerous. Spies if you like, and party to what we do.
I am really proud of my team, and the sometimes incredible stuff they do, inspired by sheer genius which over awes me. We are buoyed up with confidence and let them come on site. We let them mass mail and have fun for an hour or two, but that delete button wastes all the time spent. We lead on site security and I know that more sites will look at what we do and follow us. They have to.

Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2008 12:58 am

Quote:

I can say that we have found two dedicated "anti scammers", working within our whole community across many sites and taken them out

You are battling 'anti scammers'?????

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