Spam Alert Page

scammers are out in force this year and they are much bolder, more persistant and possibly smarter than ever before. I say that, most of them are pretty poorly educated. But Beware anyway!! it's the clever ones that will get you.

These are the pseudonyms of known scammers, spamers and phishers. they are very persistant, and judging by their e mails, they are probably all part of the same group, if not the same person.

James Morrison, Johnson Norman, Andre Ackly, Vannesssa Arianna. two just added 16 July, fred parf and Khan Ajmal. If you get an e mail from these people, just ignore it, as it is an attemp to elicite details from your reponse.

Please always be aware of scam attempts.

Here is what I propose in the shorter term.
having looked at the pattern of what scammers do.
That is, they usually send 10 to 12 enquries over the space of about 20 mins. then they sometimes repeat this later in the day.
There are 5 or 6 of them now,that I know of.

Banning them just dosn't work any more, they just re-register and I just don't have the time to look at every single registration or enquiry.

The Police aren't really interested, until you've lost money, (it's a crime then) by which time it's too late. and the Free e mail providers are burying their heads in the sand. They dont want to admit it's a problem in case they loose their scamming customers.

There is Surprisingly little on the internet as to how to deter Scammers so I have been trying to brainstorm ideas

I was thinking of implementing a registration fee, to cover the costs of a post card system,(thereby confirming users addresses), but I felt that not only would this detract from the basic free ads, but it would also introduce exrtreme delays for enquiring.

So I'm going to get the server to put any enquiry in the database for a couple of hours before being forwarded on as normal. This will give scammers enough time to do their stuff.

An algorithm will then determine whether or not it's a scammer, based on their excessive postings over a short period then delete the messages as appropriate. This will allow scammers to waste their time, but get no responses.
If it's a marginal decision, then it'll be flagged for me to have a look at, for manual determination.

hopefully this will sort it once and for all.

Implementation by beginning of August