How to prevent vbBux fraud

I am offering my members real products / services for vbBux, so I am concerned about vbBux fraud (ways to get vbBux through illegitimate means). How can you prevent some of these issues:

- Dummy referrals to obtain the referral points
- Endless refreshes when viewing a thread so thread creator gets more vbBux
- Changing the birthday date to get multiple birthday bonuses.

There may be other potential fraud risks, but these caught my eye. How are these best handled?

[Reven]

Keep the referal bonus small;
Keep the prices of your products large enough so that the user would have to refresh all day to get the points required;
Turn off birthday bonuses.

[mikeylikesitz]

i have turned off referals for now, as well as thread views, and i believe that the birthday issue is taken care of already from CMX

[forum_maniac]

Originally Posted by mikeylikesitz

I have turned off referals for now, as well as thread views, and i believe that the birthday issue is taken care of already from CMX

I think I will turn referrals off as well as thread views.

CMX: Can you confirm that it is not possible to change the birthday and get birthday points over and over again?

Here is another potential fraud risk: Registering new users to collect the register points and then donating them to the "real" user. I guess one would have to set the "Register" points to 0 to prevent that, right?

Damn, I think we need a vbBux fraud plug-in. It is annoying, but people try to take advantage of great offers.

[Freesteyelz]

Depending on the amount of points you give out, there is a way to generate quite a bit of points through post flooding. That is you have a high character post allowance and give points for each character. Then again if someone want points badly enough and determined may find a way.

If you catch anyone circumventing your rules you can set the individual points/bank to a specified amount. Click here for the SQL Queries. I've used it on several occasions. I'd also set the user(s) to a different Usergroup that has points disabled.

[forum_maniac]

Originally Posted by Freesteyelz

Depending on the amount of points you give out, there is a way to generate quite a bit of points through post flooding. That is you have a high character post allowance and give points for each character. Then again if someone want points badly enough and determined may find a way.

If you catch anyone circumventing your rules you can set the individual points/bank to a specified amount. Click here for the SQL Queries. I've used it on several occasions. I'd also set the user(s) to a different Usergroup that has points disabled.

I have turned off points per characters as someone pointed out that it would be possible to create a huge junk post and then edit the post to the real size and you would still get the points for the original character count.

Unfortunately I have turned off quite a number of features to prevent vbBux fraud:
- No referral points
- No thread view points
- No character count points

CMX: It would be great if the system would have some sort of fraud prevention or alert system built into a future release. I realize it is very complex and may not be very high in the list, but it will help the long-term viability of the add-on.

[CMX_CMGSCCC]

The birthday is not an issue, it has to be 364 more days before it gives them the birthday points again.

As far as the other options, doing what u say will prevent them, by turning them off. But a lot of sites like those options, so thats why its there to let the End User choose which way u want it.

There will always be a way to cheat if u have points for thread views enable at all. The Referral is the same way, Points For Referral's Actions Multiplier? is your answer to set this to 0. As far as the character count points, there's 1 way to exploit this and I'm working on a fix for that in the next release.

-CMX

[Bud8Fan]

Is there any way to pay interest to every member at the same moment?

Currently it pays each member at different times. Two members can gang up and donate points back and forth daily and really take advantage of the interest.