Dealing With Spammers and Scammers
When creating Datepad, we knew that the world of internet dating, and social networks were full of spammers, and people trying to scam you into elaborate schemes. Have you ever received a message from someone in Nigeria asking to deposit $12 million dollars into your account - but you need to pay a bank verification fee or something of the like? This is a classic scam, and although it sounds too farfetched to be anything but a joke, over 50,000 people fall victim to these scams each and every year. In some cases, individuals lose hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Many new start-ups in the dating and social networking field do not even pay attention to this terrible reality allowing their site to become overrun by illegitimate, thieving crooks - many situated in Africa and the Ivory Coast. At Datepad, we took a different stance. We wanted to make our site the safest, and cleanest for all of our members - on the top of our priority list was dealing with these scammers and spammers.
While there is no effective way to fully eliminate this problem, we have taken some pretty remarkable steps in reducing the occurrences. Datepad has developed proprietary methods to detect, remove and block unwanted visitors; these methods have proved to be very successful. While I can’t share the entire process with you for confidentiality reasons, I would like to give you some insight into the actions and systems we use against spammers.
Some of the basic steps we take to ensure a safe and clean environment are ways to stop automated programs (also known as bots) from sending out messages to our members. You will notice that when sending a message you are asked to enter a human verification word which effectively eliminates automated activity.
We also have an automated intelligent system in place that scans outgoing messages for known phrases and structure that are commonly found in scam e-mails. E-mails that hit a certain threat level are automatically removed from the system. In keeping with the privacy of our members, this system is fully automated - and not human moderated. We review only the messages that are caught for exception to further increase our matching algorithms.
A third, and very important step that we take to limit the spread of this scam, is not publishing our members e-mail addresses anywhere on the site. All messaging is done internally, and notifications are sent to our members. This adds an additional layer of privacy to all of our members, as they have the ability to easily report and block scam activity, keeping their personal e-mails safe.
While there are many more aspects to our systems used fight the scammers, I will be saving some for future posts. I hope that we can further educate people about scams so that we can save someone less informed from losing money to these crooks. As always, if you suspect a scammer is on Datepad, please send in an abuse ticket so that our support team can address and rectify the situation.
