For those few people who still don’t know the Nigerian 419 scam see Nigeria – The 419 Coalition Website. Otherwise let me tell you a little story of how we became unwitting pawns in this style of scam.
Not long after we launched our ezifriends personals site, we began to notice a steady number of signups from West African countries. We personally vet all signups and because of the poor quality of most these profiles, many of them were rejected. Well not actually rejected, the user is given 30 days to correct errors in the profile before it is deleted. However a few do get through our checking system and it came as a great shock to me one night to find a supposed gentleman from Togo sending dodgy business propositions to other members of the website.
Our first response was to consider ways of checking for and block such correspondence and we developed an elaborate system using bogofilter trained on a corpus of Nigerian spam. However our solution at the time was to delay approval of new profiles from West African countries. The scammers seemed to be interested in using their account only once and a 48 hr delay between signup and approval was sufficient to deter most users with criminal motives.
Anyway that is now all old news. “”Why?””, you ask. Simply because I’ve bitten the bullet and blocked access to all the IP blocks that these scammer come from. What this effectively means is that a number of West African countries can no-longer access ezifriends. The decision to do this after several attempted (and one successful) uses of stolen credit card numbers through the site. Anyway it was the charge-back by the bank on the stolen credit card that finally got to me. As far as I’m concerned it’s game over. And to any residents of Togo, Cote D’Ivoire and Nigeria who really sincerely want to meet Australian via ezifriends – well I apologise for the disruption of service, but until the fraud stops there isn’t much else I can do.