[sally]

Ah now there is an approach I hadn't thought of Simon .... am off to contact them now

[Indizine]

I recall one of the superiors on the other forum saying you could block a country but that would then exclude genuine foreign members.

Also, and it's just thinking out loud because I don't know how it stands in this country, but can you legally block a whole country?

[CPLTD]

I think you can if they are outside of the EU Indizine

[northantsit.co.uk]

As far as I am aware you are able to block a whole country, in legal terms.

"You can block access from entire countries quite easily using the FREE maxmind geoip download.

Install mod_geoip and configure your httpd.conf (or .htaccess) with :-

GeoipEnable On
GeoipDBFile /path/to/Geoip.dat
#To block Nigeria
SetEnvIf GEOip_COUNTRY_CODE NG BlockCountry
Deny from env=BlockCountry "

Might require some reading on your part if you are not up on .php scripts.

[sally]

Thank you very much, I shall get reading.

[openmind]

Couple of things to bear in mind...

Scammers often use proxy servers so blocking an IP range may not help. We get fraud attempts from IP blocks in the UK owned by Nigerian scammers but we obviously won't block UK ranges.

Nigeria isn't the only country with a high level of fraud although it's the one people will point at first. A lot of the eastern block countries and Arab states have a high level of fraud activity to so where do you stop blocking?

As mentioned above, blocking a country may result in genuine visitors also being blocked, not all Nigerians are scammers, we actually host a Nigerian charity...

Just be careful when you take this sort of action, maybe not blocking the IPs but placing their requests in a moderation queue would be less aggressive and also more flexible?

[CPLTD]

Sounds like a good Idea Openmind,
So basically if you dont have a massive volume of members join per day then you can vet each one indivually,
Also as this is a dating site mabye make the signup process more indepth i.e there profile has to have more details thus making the scammer more reluctant to fill in all the information,
Take a look at www.plentyoffish.com this is the biggest free online dating community in the world and I personally know that you have to fill in good information to be a member but again I should imagine they have scammer hitting them as no site will be invincible.

[openmind]

And if you do have a lot of signups just vet the ones from the high risk countries. The same company mentioned above have a paid service called MiniFraud that we're working into OMC. It's slightly more powerful as it uses a scoring system to fraud test each order. If the score is above a certain level it blocks it.

[sally]

It is a good point openmind.

My site is for UK residents only so I am not concerned about stopping genuine people from other countries as they would not be accepted anyway.

I said Nigeria simply because the last few have all been from there. Being in Egypt myself means I have to leave overseas open or I couldn't get on my own site!!

Making the joining process longer simply doesn't work, I have tried, they simply cut and paste information from profiles on other sites. So far I have caught them all the same day they join but am looking at a new system that will automatically tell me their location when they apply to join, coupled with careful monitoring that should solve the problem (fingers crossed).

[openmind]

No worries and please do call me Phil, openmind is my Sunday name