November 19, 2006
Tackling mobile phone spam scams on forums
I’ve been getting a heavy deluge of mobile phone spam on my forums.
It’s not just spam, it’s a scam as well - someone registers a free email address, posts on forums (usually multiple times) claiming they are an online merchant offering discounted electrical goods.
But anyone dumb enough to send them cash, never sees it again.
Although I’ve already employed a script to prevent new members posting links, the mobile phone spammers aren’t posting any.
Luckily, there’s a couple of free plugin’s via vbulletin.org that claim to allow filtering of new posts via keywords.
So hopefully I should be able to get on top of this.
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Visited 1278 times, 2 so far today since July 24th 2007
Hi Brian,
I just installed this mod in about 2 minutes - keeping my fingers crossed. I wonder if we can do more to share though. I run a few forums and I see the same spam from the same user names, email addresses and IP’s. Maybe we can make some sort of blacklist.
Comment by Paz — April 29, 2007 @ 6:10 pm
To be honest, the email addresses are so disposable that I think it’s going to be too much of a hassle to keep up a full blacklist - there are thousands of email addresses you could block, but the likelihood in my mind is that old email address are thrown aside and new ones signed up for. So it wouldn’t be so effective.
However, I have managed to prevent pretty much all mobile phone scam posts from hitting my forums due to a basic plugin that disallows links & emails by new members. :)
Comment by Brian Turner — April 30, 2007 @ 8:24 am