Dating Site Owner Needs Help

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Hello I'm New here! Joined: 09 Mar 2015 Posts: 3

I run a dating site for adults with mental illness:

Link removed - bware419ers

As you'd expect I'm overrun with scammers trying to get access. Even though I block IP ranges for all West African countries I still get quite a few. Some are home grown but most are overseas. I'm considering blocking all users with proxy servers though that might exclude some genuine traffic.

Can someone help me come up with a strategy to get rid of these?

Sometimes a scammer gets through and I only realize it later...after the bastard has already gotten several of my users off the site (email, phone, social media...) Other than delete their profile and block their IP what else can I do? Right now I have a paying member who is a scammer...I can only assume it is a stolen credit card.

Any help would be so great...

Thanks,
Jim

Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2015 4:40 am

For something like this, I think you should be as draconian as possible with your security. Block anything that's questionable, and if a blocked user wants access, they may need to go through an additional validation process.

Alternatively, is there a way in which you could set up a system in which all potential users need to be referred to the site by a licensed medical professional?

Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2015 4:55 am

^^^I'm guessing a lot of members may not want to be referred and validation may also be a problem - both could raise privacy worries for them.

As a starting point Jim, if you aren't already, filtering out the common email address formats in messages will cut out some (although many will disguise them with spaces, "[at]" instead of "@", etc. so you will need to allow for those as well).

Also, many scammers will get their account set up and then message as many members as possible to get them offsite as quickly as possible before they're noticed and deleted, so perhaps flagging new members who message more than X number of people with the exact same message could highlight some of them.

I didn't sign up to your site, so I don't know what type of information you request from users, but often scammers will give themselves away with their answers to ethnicity, job, height/weight - so you may be able to use that to identify suspect accounts.

Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2015 5:07 am

Do memberships have to be approved by you before they appear on the site or can access others' profiles?

I'm an aspie and have had little success with dating sites, so this may be different from other users of dating sites. If I'm checking out a new dating site, I try a search and would like to see part of peoples' profiles, but don't expect to have enough information to contact them until I join. If I can't search the site without joining, it gives me no clue on how suitable the site is.

Wannabe Baiter Joined: 07 Oct 2010 Posts: 82

There's lot of things you can do.

Do you device identification? if you have scammers who are mostly operating from overseas internet cafes, you may want to invest in a device fingerprinting service. This creates a social security number for the machine hitting your system, and once identified via velocity or fraud, you can block that machine from ever listing again. If not, use the cookie (sometimes called a poor man's device ID)

Use a proxy piercer to find the true IP hitting your system.

Use google image search or tineye on pics as they come in to determine if they are the actual poster's real pics, or if stolen.

Setup velocity rules on people's online descriptions of themselves.

track the session times for how long it takes to setup an account to stop bots from using your service and creating profiles (or google recaptcha helps stop bots too)

Is this service making a lot of money? Consider paying for a fraud service to review all your transactions as they come through. PM me if you would like some suggestions(although they are NOT cheap)

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 09 Mar 2015 Posts: 3

Thanks for the responses guys. Yes I screen all applicants. When an IP address doesn't match up with the location of their profile I flag it and then do due diligence to see if I suspect a scammer. And yes there are obvious signs out there and some are easy to weed out and some are not. Sometimes the locations match and it is still a scammer. I do have a failsafe so I get an alert if someone is spamming the site. Setting a filter for "@" is a good idea.

Please help with this current instance. I have a PAID user who I now know is a scammer. Must be stolen cc. He gives out a phone # and email addy in initial messages. His passworCameroon122XXXXXXXX" can't believe that is coincidence. Anyway, I have him deactivated while I consider next step. What should I do? Is there any way to get law enforcement involved? Does one of you want to mess with him?

Thanks in advance,
Jim

Edited password - bware419ers

Posted: Tue Mar 10, 2015 12:46 am

If you have the message that he was sending post it along with his email address in Scamwarners, the Eater sister site or I'm sure another user wouldn't mind doing it for you. It could potentially be baitable. We have a whole board dedicated to the romance lads. You could also set up several fake user accounts purposely disguised to capture the lads and then IP Block them, they don't really use VPN's in the Internet cafes so it should help.

Posted: Tue Mar 10, 2015 1:46 am

^^^It is not "definitely baitable" until we have conclusive proof they are committing advance free fraud.

Lefty, I have sent you a PM. With all due respect, just because you "know (this) is a scammer," we don't.

Posted: Tue Mar 10, 2015 3:19 am

Do you have a mechanism for tracking which members a potential scammer has messaged? If so, are you notifying those members that the account was inactivated by the site, even if that message is a standard script that simply states that you have inactivated the account for violations of TOS or something that? (I assume your TOS has some requirements you can cite or you can tweak them to.)

This is a step that a lot of dating sites don't take, and it's one that would help tremendously, because generally the first thing a scammer does when the account is closed is tell each of his victims that he closed the account himself because he fell in love with them. Catching him in that lie would make a lot of victims question things right there.

As for scenarios in which you have a potential stolen credit card--have you considered something like a snail mail letter to the address on file for the card, with instructions to follow to keep the account active, or something like gmail or facebook uses, requiring a phone number that can receive a text?

Other checks you can perform: as stated above, do an image search for the photos. If not feasible for all members, at least you can try it for those you suspect of being fake. And on suspect members, check the profile itself for significant errors--as mentioned above, Africans often don't know the basics (particularly when it comes to US customary units of measurements, so if they are supposed to be America, the height and weight are dead giveaways.) The scammers also like to copy profiles. Search for a few different lines of the profile text, in quotes, to find whether it is copied. (Search the lines separately.) Theft of copyrighted material can also be grounds for inactivating the account, if necessary.

And just to address this point:

Quote:

Block them, they don't really use VPN's in the Internet cafes so it should help.

Not necessarily true. There are some cafes that do in fact charge a higher price for "special" computers that can be used for bypassing security and/or using compromised cards, and those cafes may very well subscribe to a VPN service.

Posted: Tue Mar 10, 2015 3:31 am

Scammers will also get current victims to set up profiles for them, "for a friend". The initial IP may pass any checks, but it would be worth checking subsequent logins to see if the country changes from what was used to register.

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 10 Sep 2014 Posts: 8

I helped a dating site one time, or better several of them. The new owner wanted Website removed - bware419ers scammer free.
The problem is if you hunt them well, they'll just visit you once, try to get a few victims to join another chat program and they're gone again, the next time they'll visit, they give a different name/picture and do the same again, so banning them doesn’t stop them at all, they'll probably never notice it.
Several layers of forum, a common trick also used on familiar sites, will allow visitors/members to gain trust of the members/administrators to climb up in the ranks. At the same time you could make the members aware of the problem, ask them to help if they have any doubt with a new member. But it will take some time to clean up the lists and get the wrong and “dead” members out. Lots of boring work and in the end you don't trust anyone Smile

Good luck

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