Dealing with Scammers

This is a little about how I have dealt with a particular type of scammer on my forums.

First, let me point out that, to me, there is a difference between scammers and spammers.

In this post I am taking mainly about scammers, although some of what I do can be helpful of preventing spammers also. I am also going to be linking to Xenforo addons but if you use a different software you may have to have something similar created for your software.

A little about me. I own a number of forums (mostly automotive) which are very large and active. Some of these forums have been around more than 20 years and are the go to site for the community.

So the main scam I am talking about works like this and applies if you have a “Wanted to Buy” forum or something similar where your members are posting they are looking for something specific to buy.

So here is what happens. A member posts a wanted to buy ad looking for some specific part. The scammer comes along, joins your site, and sends a private message to the member telling them they (or a friend) has the part and giving them either an email to send an email to or a phone number to text.

Once they make a deal off the site, the member will send them the money for the part (through one method or another) and the member never receives anything.

Ok, so how do I combat that?

Ok, so first thing I do is take a step to advise the member directly before it happens. I had NixFifty create an addon called Forum Agreement.

Now this addon can be helpful in other ways as well, but for this purpose, it brings up a splash screen for those starting a thread in a particular forum. In my case its a Parts Wanted forum. The splash screen, shown below, warns the user about this scam and requires them to agree.

This gives the user the information they need to avoid the problem.

Ok, The second thing I do, and this can be helpful with spammers as well as scammers, is an addon AndyB already had which I asked him to modify.

The addon is Register email.

This addon sends email to designated staff members when there’s a new registration. What I did was have him add a Browser Timezone field. This is the email you receive.

These scammers usually make one of several mistakes.

I have a “Location” question as part of the registration process, as well as asking them what kind of car they own.

What you’ll see from most scammers is the IP location, the Location they put in while registering, and the Browser timezone don’t match up. This is your first big tip off. Usually its the browser timezone as the scammer has to manually change that in their browser settings and since they almost always use a VPN their IP location changes.

This tip off tells you to investigate further. As you see above the user registered with a Chicago IP, and put his location as Chicago, but never changed his browser time zone from Africa. When I check the IP address it comes back to a VPN. Finally, in this case, he doesn’t list a car he owns. So, I am 99% confident he is a scammer or spammer and I ban him as a spammer. (banning as a spammer deleted all PMs sent thwarting his whole scam)

So this is how I stop these guys from scamming my members. Even the occasional one who gets through almost never gets anywhere because I have also warned the members posting WTB ads. Anyone that gets through all this the blame now falls completely on the member who was warned and ignored the warning.