The easiest first step is to block access from countries that you won’t get a decent amount of custom from anyway. For us, anyone outside UK, USA, Canada, South Africa or Australia are automatically blocked.

We don’t monetize visitors from other countries yet they could be a spammer.

We use Iovation to deal with most scammers and have full time staff at our HQ to remove scammers.

Profile approval is a definitely help in dealing with scammers – no profiles can go live or messages sent without a profile being manually approved.

The only downside of this approach is that you can’t monetize a member until the profile has been approved which isn’t ideal as their excitement from the first visit may have diminished.

We get a positive response from our members as we deal with scammers.

It’s also a benefit of paid sites that can afford to employ full time staff to deal with the problem of scammers – by paying a subscription, members know that they’ll get a half decent service rather than a free site full of scammers.

Ross