The botnet admins have completely defeated gmail

Originally Posted by Big Al

Max if you feel comfortable with sending me the information, I will pass it along to those who deal with these things.

As I posted earlier, I think we should ALL try to to stop the spammers/scammers and those who support them.

I am on many anti-fraud websites and I am interested in helping the victims and exposing the scum who prey on them, no matter where they hide.

In theory, its a good idea. In practice, it will never work.

When I started my forum, I never thought I'd become an expert in covert spammer and scammer detection and defense. Even now, six and a half years later, I've accepted that both are absolutely impossible to stop and/or punish. So while we do a pretty awesome job most of the time, every now and again we get hit pretty hard but are able to combat against it using simple filters.

Things you may want to consider, although annoying to the common user, but pretty effective from a general stand point, is to adjust how new users can or can't operate, whether it be by limiting their ability to create a new thread/post, post img's or not, use sig links or not, post a link of any kind or not. Things that aren't set in stone, but flexible and can be adapted to the nature of the user.

I think the worst, and by far, the toughest to route out are the groups that create real accounts, let them mature for half a year or so, and then spam the crap out of the forum. We monitor other forums for users there attempting to buy accounts from our forum for their spamming and/or scamming interests.

Overall, its an uphill battle. It will never go away completely (let's not sugar coat it or be naive). I mean, don't get me wrong, I sure hope it does someday. Many of the IP blacklisting and ID monitoring services do help, a lot, but nothing I've ever seen or done has ever been able to completely stomp it out 100%, aside for turning te forum off or shutting it down... that is... except for maybe high priced paid to join forums (even there, I've seen/heard of rogue users being normal for years and just overnight becoming scamming bastards).

The way I see it, if someone wants to spam and scam in a very clever way, they will do it. Nothing we can do will stop them. But if you're serious about your forum, you'll do what you need to do to combat it and manage the risk. Its an unfortunate, incredibly time consuming and resource intensive part of owning and operating a forum, small and large alike... and god forbid your forum is considered an authority site by Google, like ours. After that, battling these things becomes part of your everyday routine in managing the forum as a whole.

It is what it is. So everyone reading this, you're not alone. But there's really only so much we can all do as a group too.