Hey,

Within 6 weeks of starting a free dating site I ended up banning all of Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and Ivory Coast. I'm wondering what people think are the best methods of deterring scammers from "bombarding" the rest of the community with garbage scams?

This is what I've tried so far...

- Force users to register from the country that I detect they are from (using IP geo-location and don't allow countries above)
- Easy way of reporting users, I then go and ban them
- Don't allow duplicate messages to be sent with a 24 hr period
- Allow users to setup filters/criteria for people that are allowed to message them

After all this... I feel that it's a losing battle!

Any other interesting ideas out there? I'd rather spend my time building useful features...

Randy

Oh, and I know that charging people a fee would most likely deter some/most scammers (i think?)... but I'm not about to do that.

I want to implement intelligent features to promote a good dating community, without an overabundance of scammers.

Randy

There is no way to discourage scammers but a good way to catch them is to recognize the way they all start messaging you. I pretty much tell them I'm pretty good at catching them. They immediately Block me when I say that. There are so many repetitive things all scammers do and you learn to recognize them. I'd like to put a list out there for all to see.