User Impersonation

[MrEyes]

In the last couple of weeks I have been having an administration nightmare with something the more devious members of my forum have come up with.

Lets say that on my forum there is a member with the user name "COOLDude", what has happened is that somebody has registered the username "C0OLDude" and then proceeded to impersonate the original member and cause havoc. Typically nobody notices this until the original user comes along and points it out.

As and when these are reported I remove the accounts, however it would be great to stop these at the point of registration.

Obviously there is nothing default VB for this so it would be a mod, so does one exist (tried searching and didn't come up with anything)

The only way I can imagine this could be implemented would be to create a match list of characters (i.e 0 = O), then on registration check all current registered users that have a character in their username on the match list, and then compare the new registration username agaisnt variations. In other words a load of hassle and a big DB hit for larger sites.

[Bradley_Wint]

Hmmm yea I have seen cases of this many times but that would unfortunately have to be done on an individual basis since many possibilities can occur plus what about users who create a similar name but do not know they are impersonating..

What I can recommend is doing IP bans and see if that cuts down on fraudulent accounts.