Websites and
SCAMMERS & SPAMMERS
Being an Internet based
company we have learned all too well that the Internet is full of
scams and spammers.
We launched Buzztrader.com at considerable cost back in 2004 and with the
immense popularity of a website with millions of visitors we were
flooded with scammers.
Anytime you have a website
with the potential for a scammer to make money, they will appear
out of the woodwork like cockroaches.
At first we thought our
business model was flawed, we were offering free ads for selling
cars. Maybe if we charged for the ads the scammers would go away
because they wont spend money paying for ads.
But that made it worse,
because now they were placing ads with stolen credit cards. What
a mess.
The value to
Scammers
The value to scammers was they
could advertise a $20,000 car for $5000 and some idiot will think
they are taking this unsuspecting car owner for a ride. But in
fact, there is no car, so when the buyer pays $5000 via western
union the money is gone, usually to Nigeria.
This type of scam has never
gone away and is still very popular today. It took us out f the
classified market because the resources to manage all the
scammers was more than the websites could ever produce in value.
Once they started using stolen
credit cards there was no way to control them and they were
jepardizing our ability to collect credit cards because of course
VISA & MC assume you are doing it yourself and they don't car
who is scamming you.
So we went back to all FREE
ads to avoid losing our merchant processing contracts.
The other Side of
the SCAM
Then we have to deal with the
other side of the scam, the idiot that sent a check to Nigeria
for $5,000 thinking there were getting a $50,000 car shipped to
them.
Or the car sellers that were
shipping cars with checks from Nigeria or just on fake banks.
People were losing tens of thousands of dollars right in front of
our faces and there was nothing we could so.
Once seller called me to
ask if the buyer was scamming them because he was paying $10,000
for a $5000 car and the seller just needed to send $2000 to
the shipper and keep the extra $3000 for the effort.
I told him it was a scam
but the seller said, it was too good a deal to pass up and he
needed the money.
And guess how this
all played out as if you don't already know.
The seller gets a
check for $10,000 and deposits it in his bank
2 days later he checks
hs account and it is cleared
The seller send $2000
to the shipper via Western Union
10 days later the bank
contacts the seller and tells him the check was fake
The police now arrest
the seller for fraud on the bank
Oh, yes, people are going to
jail for being victims of scammers, it is really bad.
That is just my experience
with the used car market, it gets worse o some of the other sites.
The we have the
SPAMMERS!
These are the guys that just
relentlessly send spam and use every technique every flaw in the
email system and every mistake website owners make to send as
much email as possible.
We watch web forms get
exploited so we added CAPTCHA (the number and letters you type to
submit forms) but still spammers would fill out forms and send
spam.
We used to have default mail
forwarding but spammers would make up hundreds of email addresses
at a single domain hoping some of them would be good, in the case
of defaults all the spam was delivered.
Customers called us with
thousands of emails in their inbox.
Of course, they expect
us to solve the problem like we sent them or something!
What was my response? "Welcome
to the INTERNET".
This is a fact we have to deal
with every day as does every website owner. So what should you do?
Check all sales and
validate the buyer
use mail systems with
good mail filters
don't respond to
offers that are too good to be true
Validate Buyers
If you get a sale, it wont
kill you to make a hone call make sure the sale is legit and that
you can ship it. If you mail out a diamond ring based on an
online order there is a good chance that it is from a stolen
credit card and you will lose the money.
Use delivery confirmations so
that you have an address and a signature to verify that a real
person accepted the goods and require that it be the same person
that had the name on the credit card.
Email Filters
If you use systems like
Hotmail, Gmail or Ymail they have pretty good filters to help
with spam. Sometimes too good and you lose important mil as well.
But if you use a pop account
at a small ISP chances are they have very little in place to
filter spam so you will get more of it ad maybe more than you can
even manage.
If it looks too
good to be true, it probably is
If you have a store and your
sales are slow, when someone says they are a buyer from a big
store, that is exciting. But when they tell you they will pay for
the order and you will refund part of the sale back to them, you
know there is a problem.
There are many ways people get
caught, but it all comes down to being greedy and no wanting to
lose one sale that is too good to be true.
If it smells like a fish it is
probably a fish.
Just use common sense and make
good decisions.
Good customers
online
There are more good customers
than bad ones, so there is plenty of money to be made with
websites. But you need to run it like any other business,
carefully.
We have to deal with scammers
still today setting up fake car dealer websites and fake stores
to scam people. For us, they usually use stolen credit cards and
even we get scammed.
So we have to validate each
new sign up, call them talk to them and make sure they have a
legit business.
Yes, it is extra work and
costs us time and money but without a good plan to deal with
scammers and spammers you will fail.
Spammers have irritated
companies like AOL crashing their mail servers with spam,
spamming their chatrooms and harassing their users.
So don't feel like you are
special or they are targeting you individually. The target
everyone and everything.
If you are online, you
are a target. So don't paint an X on your back, stay low, use
good practices and you can avoid most of the fall out.
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