Discussion
Since I was scammed out of 2k I have looked for other adverts trying to do to others as I foolishly fell for.I have found about 20 scam ads half of which emailed me saying car was abroad ready to be shipped after payment was sent to an agent abroad.The latest one is an Audi tt for £6300.and their email say they need the money for an opperation on their sick child in Germany but your payment is through a special ebay account how does this work and when will this site be able to try and stop these adverts and protect people who visit this site?
Ray 1772 said:
Since I was scammed out of 2k I have looked for other adverts trying to do to others as I foolishly fell for.I have found about 20 scam ads half of which emailed me saying car was abroad ready to be shipped after payment was sent to an agent abroad.The latest one is an Audi tt for £6300.and their email say they need the money for an opperation on their sick child in Germany but your payment is through a special ebay account how does this work and when will this site be able to try and stop these adverts and protect people who visit this site?
Can PH set up an automated system whereby PH sends an email to the advertiser posing as a genuine buyer, and await a reasonable response before putting the advert up live? Should be simple enough to do.This seems to be an increasing, not decreasing issue....
It is increasing despite talks with plod, and companies like HPI even sharing knowledge with Auto Trader.
After months of head scratching the only foolproof way of doing this is to do a check against a home address, and this can be done with a credit card payment. Thing is, I don't want to start charging for PH ads, as it's not the way we work. There is an outside chance that the scammers can use a stolen card but thats a lot of effort and by the time they submit it the card will have probably been stopped.
We have looked at e mail recognition too, and at the moment scam ads e mail addresses are banned but they simply set up another account. Then we looked to ban IP's but that implicates innocent users.
Currently I trawl the site to seek out scammers and manually approve as many ads as possible- although this does delay the amount of time it takes to make an advert go live
There is no doubt that we are hit hard by these guys because we are free, and I want to be 100% sure there is no other way of ridding us of these losers before I have to charge genuine PHers. Even if it's only £1.
Promise to keep you posted with any developments
G
After months of head scratching the only foolproof way of doing this is to do a check against a home address, and this can be done with a credit card payment. Thing is, I don't want to start charging for PH ads, as it's not the way we work. There is an outside chance that the scammers can use a stolen card but thats a lot of effort and by the time they submit it the card will have probably been stopped.
We have looked at e mail recognition too, and at the moment scam ads e mail addresses are banned but they simply set up another account. Then we looked to ban IP's but that implicates innocent users.
Currently I trawl the site to seek out scammers and manually approve as many ads as possible- although this does delay the amount of time it takes to make an advert go live
There is no doubt that we are hit hard by these guys because we are free, and I want to be 100% sure there is no other way of ridding us of these losers before I have to charge genuine PHers. Even if it's only £1.
Promise to keep you posted with any developments
G
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