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I’m working on a few items related to dating site spam. While I put things together, here
s my current favorite opening line from Russian Brides.
“hi, I very much liked your structure and me more…”
I’ve received 25 emails like this on Yahoo! over the past few weeks. Each one exactly the same, with different pictures. For some reason, Match doesn’t seems to suffer from the same inundation of spam that Yahoo does.
I’ve responded to a few of the lovelies, we’ll see what happens.
Yahoo should at run a filter over their active profiles. How difficult can that be? They have hundreds of customer service reps that could work on this. That would be a fantastic customer relations project. “We’re making dating easier, safer and faster for our members.”
If they don’t do it, which they probably won’t, maybe you should think about doing it on your service.
Unfortunately for many free sites, this would reduce the number of active profiles by 40% or more.
[tags: Russian Brides, Yaho]
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Blog reactions
3 responses so far ↓
1
Edward Orysiek (Check me out!)
// Jul 13, 2005 at 1:17 pm
Very timely thread Dave.
I’ve had a real problem with Russian, Ukrainian and Nigerians scamming my members and using stolen credit cards. I have started posting the scammers on my blog linked from my site. If they are persistent in creating a new profile, I will configure their profile so when they send their scam emails their emails are deleted from the system before delivered to a member’s email box. This keeps the scammers busy sending emails into a blackhole.
Disclaimer: A browse of my site will show that I still have work to do in eliminating the older profiles.
I’ve contacted an identity verification service linked from this site to see if they can assist me as well. I’ll report my findings here.
Edward
2
Markus (Check me out!)
// Jul 13, 2005 at 8:40 pm
…reduce the number of active profiles by 40% or more…
That is probably only true for webdate.com Just do a search on nigeria, lagos state, lagos city. You get back 600 profiles from models hahaha.
Match.com seems to be hiring a lot of people for scam detection.
http://match.isg2.com/
For both paid and free sites 5-8% of all signups are scammers or escorts. Paid sites have a lot harder time detecting them, because the ROI is so good a lot of scammers pay for membership.
http://www.womenrussia.com/scammers_caught.htm
“According to Chelyabinsk police, the couple scammed more than 1,500 men and extorted more than 1,5 million US Dollars from them, in the period of 2000-2002″
Given that match.com signs up 60,000 profiles a day that works out to about 3,000 scammers signing up per day.
I can see a great new slogan for yahoo. “You have a better chance of being conned then you do of getting married.”
3
meir (Check me out!)
// Jul 15, 2005 at 12:38 am
I’m curious if Yahoo is going to feature any of these Russian girls in their “We don’t use models” photo shoot? They are pretty nice looking…What do you think Dave?