Interesting Scam/Fraud Problem to Solve

by noriodesousa

Posted: 12 years ago 9 replies

PROGRAMMING

I own www.getpuppies.co.za/www.puppiesforsale.co.za and it gets a LOT of traffic. It's ranked #1 for a lot of high-traffic keywords and my AdWords campaign is simply awesome.

That's all well and good but now with the "success" of the website, I've run into a problem: Scamsters.

They post ads of OTHER people holding pets and use enticing descriptions and focus on the really high-demand breeds. That combination results in a lot of people being scammed. (They never receive their puppies after paying for them plus "extra shipping fees" the scamsters insist on.)

I've tried a lot of things to try and stop them but none have worked that well:

- Blocking gmail.com, etc (This resulted in non-scammers being blocked)
- Allowing only unique numbers (Not very effective)
- Allowing only unique emails (Also not effective)
- Charging (Almost no one paid)
- Charging less ($0.50 via PayPal - still not many paying advertisers)
- Manual moderation (There are just too many scammy ads posted daily for this to work)
- Only allowing 1 post per user per 7 days (Scammers created LOTS of accounts)

I'm earning a good amount from AdSense (nothing amazing but still good money) so I don't care about charging for ads and have since dropped that but I need a way to validate advertisers so that the site's content can grow again. (I wiped all the old ads in an effort to "clean up" after receiving many scam complaints).

What can I try next?

#interesting #problem #scam or fraud #solve

tweakr 12 years ago

Try something like craigslist has, I don't know if it's the same everywhere so I'll explain.

To post an ad on there you need to verify your email and your phone number. To keep scammers and spammers out they also require that the phone number be a real land line or cell phone number, no VIOPs or anything like that allowed since those can also be created freely.

I'm not sure how much something like that would cost to have, but other than charging your customers I can't think of any other way.
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noriodesousa 12 years ago

Thanks

The trouble is that verifying the number or email wouldn't be effective as those are so easy to get, so they can still just create many email accounts and multiple throwaway cellphone sim cards and still spam the site :/

A landline number is harder to get but, then, a lot of people don't have those any more with the proliferation of mobile phones :/
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tweakr 12 years ago

Yes, the pre-paid phones are cheap and easy to come by. But they are able to also block those, it needs to be a mobile phone with a contract in order to use it for posting an ad.
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vulcanscripts 12 years ago

Is there a common theme to the wording of these scams? If so then you could build a detection algorithm based on previous scam ads to automatically flag suspect posts. You could also add a "report ad" button and enable your visitors to help you combat the problem?
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Monsignor 12 years ago

Hm, unless the scammers are posting schematic posts which PHP (or whatever your site is coded in) can recognize, then I don't think there is a coding solution...you can of course easily block IPs and e-mails (or even IP ranges if you wanna get drastic) but other than that, I don't know.

The best I can suggest is getting someone to build a nice admin tool which would allow you to delete the scam ads in bulk and block the IP/e-mail in the back-end automatically, which is by no means a permanent solution but it would make your life easier.
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Jaked 12 years ago

If they're copying other posts, I would try to compare the listings. Comparing the text would be quite simple, but you could go as far as comparing the images against images of already posted listings (see: PHP: Imagick::compareImages - Manual). Also, if you detect that someone is attempting to scam I recommend not visibly banning them as they will just figure out how to avoid your detection. Instead, make their listing only visible to themselves so they have a lot more trouble telling if they've been banned. Between this, I.P. banning, and cell phone verification I think it would greatly decrease the amount of scammers. There is no solution that will prevent all of them, just lots of small things to deter them and make them conclude that it's not worth it to keep attempting to scam via your website.

Hope this helps!
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- vulcanscripts 12 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by Jaked
  
  Instead, make their listing only visible to themselves so they have a lot more trouble telling if they've been banned.
  
  I don't know if that helps the OP, but that my friend is ingenious!
  
  Thanks
  
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noriodesousa 12 years ago

tweakr, I wouldn't know how to block the pre-paid mobiles. I don't think there's a publicly available API or known pattern-matching that would work for ZA phones :/

vulcan, the wording differs quite widely from ad to ad and it seems they copy bits from other peoples' ads, so that would result in a lot of false-positives. The "report ad" idea is great and something I'll implement - thanks!

That said, some sort of text message phone verification COUPLED with a blacklist to block numbers known to post scams to the site could work without TOO much added work for me. Because although it's easy to get a mobile phone, it has become more difficult in recent years thanks to new laws in ZA like RICA. (Thank you tweakr, your first reply got me thinking down this line.)
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noriodesousa 12 years ago

Thanks for all the replies Sorry for not replying to each one in my last reply, I didn't refresh before replying.

Jaked, I love the idea of making their posts only visible to them. Genius! I had some other things typed up to post but then I clicked a link and lost all that

But all the same, thanks for all the replies guys. I think I have a workable solution thanks to all your input!
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