My question is not related to my350z but thought the admins/mods here might have an answer.

For years, I've been the Admin guy on a sports collectable site. For the last few years we get 50 or 60 registrations a week from Russia, the Ukraine, & other countries who have no interest in sports or collectibles. They are bad guys of some type. I can identify where they are by using an IP locator.

It has gotten so bad that new member registrations are retained in the queue and I approve/disaprove on an individual basis. Not a big deal because it takes little time. But I'm curious.

Do the admins here see similar practices? Any idea of what their purpose is?

 

yes, we experience the same things here. We are currently manually authorizing new accounts. It takes a little longer, but it helps weed out the spam accounts and the banned users trying to re-register.

Most of the Russian ip's I have seen have been spammers/scammers.

 

Interesting. They must have a lot of free time on their hands because they accomplish nothing. We had the IT guys revise the queue such that I can eliminate them with a couple of clicks.

Any idea if this is their idea of "fun" or is there some purpose for it?

 

probably scamming IMO, but they are not to smart about it.

Dave actually found a common ip address for a lot of them and we ip banned it. Don't know how much that cut down though.

 

I've banned at least 50 IP addresses................... didn't slow traffic abit; they just moved on to next computer.

One I tracked actually showed it was in the Kremlin! KGB must be really bored. LOL!

Provides whole new meaning to "The Russians are coming" and "Red Dawn".

 

You may be more right than you know. I hope not, but you never know.

 

Since the "perestroika"/"glasnost" days, Russia's gone down the drain. The Russian Mafia
is intensely violent; rogue elements of all kinds pan out their tentacles outside their ter-
ritory, including informatics. Watch out, dude! ("The Bourne Supremacy" gives you an
idea of what's going on there).

 

The folks trying to spam websites ain't all that bright from what I've seen. I've set up some questions that people have to answer to register. If the bad guys had any smarts they could figure out how to provide answers that might fool me. None, out of several hundred, have even tried.

We are not dealing with serious bad guys.

 

Do you run VBulletin?

If so - run 3.7... much better spam management

 

They(communists) are starting new threads in the P/W section daily.......

 

TX does start a lot of threads doesn't he

 

I definitely feel you. Recently, we've been getting close to 200 new registrations almost every day or two and it sucks to manually approve them [or not]. Pretty time consuming.

Many of them try to re-register once they see that their first account they created was ignored, deleted, or overlooked (both of which get deleted anyway later on). What I like the most is when multiple IDs are created from the same or similar IPs with different locations around the world. Using similar email accounts or fake ones is also common.

I've also noticed that a lot of them just sign up and never return again. I see many of the older currently existing members (inactive) that overlap in their IP with the newly registering ones (again with different locations :rofl).

 

Glad I posted this. Nice to know its not just my site. What you guys describe is exactly what I see with one difference; I zap 100 a week, you have to do that many a day.

90% I can tell just by looking at name & email addy; just a couple clicks to reject & delete. The other 10% I have to go look at the custom fields (questions) I came up with. Real applicants can easily answer but the spammers have no clue.

 

I was ready to kick someone's *** when I saw the title. Was like, WTF?
Russia-based scammers...

 

Just wondered about the below question:
Anyway - I assist admining 84 different auto forums (some of them extremely large), and we have exactly the same issues on all of them with regards to spam.

In fact, there has been quite an influx of it recently.