Recent Spate of Scam/Spam Profiles

Hi All,

As you may be aware the site has been targeted by Spam/Scam profile lately.  We are working to remove these profiles and we appreciate your patience at this time.  Please refrain from reporting these profiles as this only adds to the moderators workload.

As you can understand; If ten members report six spam accounts each, Admin and Moderators have to process 60 reports.  It soon becomes more work to deal with the reports than actually removing the spam profiles and bear in mind that actually reporting the profiles does not remove them from the site.

Cheers

Seamus

(Moderator)

Unfortunately the spammers are back at it again.  As before, we are working hard at trying to prevent them from disrupting the site too much, however this requires a lot of effort from Admin and the Moderator team.  If you could please refrain from reporting these obvious spam profiles as this only adds to the workload

Surely reporting the spam profiles would provide a quicker way to identify and remove them, letting admin troll through many hundreds if not thousands of profiles per day would take so much longer, just my thoughts as a past moderator when it was the Aussie site only.

Quote by cuninglinguist
Surely reporting the spam profiles would provide a quicker way to identify and remove them, letting admin troll through many hundreds if not thousands of profiles per day would take so much longer, just my thoughts as a past moderator when it was the Aussie site only.

 We already have methods of detecting the spammers before they create accounts via their IP addresses.  If there is a moderator online, we can stop them, but we can't be online 24/7, it's during those times that the spammers cause all the problems.  To give you an idea of the problem, at their worst, the spammers were creating an new, email-verified profile every 90 seconds.  We have implemented a short-term fix at the moment hopefully a long term solution can be found.

I've never had so many likes ....its been boosting the old ego haha don't delete them all😉

Quote by supermoto
I've never had so many likes ....its been boosting the old ego haha don't delete them all😉

We'll start a campaign to get you some real Aussie likes then ;)

I've got the solution to your problem.
When you report on a profile/photo there should be an icon/symbol that says something like Admin and Moderators is looking into this matter and no need to report this to us??
How are we meant to know if it's been reported or not??
Maybe disabled the join button from 8 pm to 6 am??
Back in the old days, it uses to take 24/48 hours just to get approved and you couldn't upload any photo/video.
Maybe that's an option as well??

Quote by v10inchcock
I've got the solution to your problem.
When you report on a profile/photo there should be an icon/symbol that says something like Admin and Moderators is looking into this matter and no need to report this to us??
How are we meant to know if it's been reported or not??
Maybe disabled the join button from 8 pm to 6 am??
Back in the old days, it uses to take 24/48 hours just to get approved and you couldn't upload any photo/video.
Maybe that's an option as well??

 I'm sure Admin and the technical team will look at your suggestions, but modifications can take quite some time to implement so in the meantime please refrain from reporting the blatantly obvious spam profiles.  The Admin/Moderator team are monitoring the new members closely so you can assume that we will recognise these profiles and deal with them quickly.

Admin has made some changes behind the scenes which prevents profiles that have been created overseas from gaining access to the site.  The moderator team is currently working on reducing the Australian based VPN's that the spammers are using.  This has reduced the amount of spam drastically, but they are still trying to gain access to the site.

At my age a notification is rare and as uplifting as a morning erection.

What a let down. Is there anyway you can just block the link on thier profile and let them like  us?

Quote by equilibrium

At my age a notification is rare and as uplifting as a morning erection.

What a let down. Is there anyway you can just block the link on thier profile and let them like  us?

Sorry mate, they are a big risk to the privacy of our members and the security of this site.  Just remember they are not sexy Russian ladies, the profiles are most likely generated by a room full of Indian or Russian computer nerds and they are targeting Single Male profiles, including my own, to try and scam money or gain access to your computer.  

There has been a recent uptick in these profiles again - Please avoid contacting them - We will remove them as soon as we see them

Glad I looked at this thread. 

I won't report anymore, thought it was the right thing. 

All good, best of luck to the mod team removing the spam.

They are back at it again - please bear with us while we deal with this issue

Unfortunately these flogs are turning this site into rubbish 

It’s a daily occurrence 

Becoming very boring 

Quote by Seamus_OToole

They are back at it again - please bear with us while we deal with this issue

I know this is getting boring, but the spammers have made a bit of a come-back.  We have systems that flag their profiles for us, but a moderator has to be online to remove them and we can't be here 24/7.  Reporting them only increases the moderators work load so please don't report them.

Quote by Seamus_OToole

I know this is getting boring, but the spammers have made a bit of a come-back.  We have systems that flag their profiles for us, but a moderator has to be online to remove them and we can't be here 24/7.  Reporting them only increases the moderators work load so please don't report them.

Still at it as of today. I set up a name and shame folder in my gallery which was removed but I think its a great way of getting it out to our community that they are Bots or fake

Quote by Khloeandco

Still at it as of today. I set up a name and shame folder in my gallery which was removed but I think its a great way of getting it out to our community that they are Bots or fake

You were actually shaming genuine profiles who were using the wink function which sends the same pre-written message. This is why we have rules against Naming and Shaming.

Quote by Seamus_OToole

Quote by Khloeandco

Still at it as of today. I set up a name and shame folder in my gallery which was removed but I think its a great way of getting it out to our community that they are Bots or fake

You were actually shaming genuine profiles who were using the wink function which sends the same pre-written message. This is why we have rules against Naming and Shaming.

Maybe make it a bit more obvious then because getting bulk messages all saying exactly the same thing from unverified users makes it quite easy to think they are fake accounts

You can apply setting that will block "winks". Go into your mail-box and click on the "settings" sprocket above your messages and select "Wink Settings".

Quote by Khloeandco
because getting bulk messages all saying exactly the same thing from unverified users makes it quite easy to think they are fake accounts

Welcome @Khloeandco. Even for long time users, this can be misleading. Perhaps admin can design a way to remove any chance of misunderstanding?

Quote by orangesound

Quote by Khloeandco
because getting bulk messages all saying exactly the same thing from unverified users makes it quite easy to think they are fake accounts

Welcome @Khloeandco. Even for long time users, this can be misleading. Perhaps admin can design a way to remove any chance of misunderstanding?

Well, looking at the profile first might help. There are tell tale signs of fake accounts, genuine members don't put a 'Facebook' style pic up of the couple clearly identifiable day 1 and list every Like going.

UPDATE;

As some of you are aware we are still getting hit by these scammers/spammers. On average we are seeing 10 fake profiles created every day. We do have processes to identify these accounts, but to intercept them before they "like" or try and contact our members requires a Moderator or Admin to be online when the fake profiles are created and we can't be here 24/7. But I believe we are catching about 70% of them before they can cause any annoyance.

We are getting quite a few complaints, and we acknowledge that this is frustrating, trust me when I say it is even more frustrating for the moderator team. But compared to a few months ago the situation is much better. Recent changes to the site have meant that the spammers cannot upload media straight into the gallery and a new detection system is working well.

I am still seeing some members trying to contact these spammers. Please don't engage with them, even if it is to hurl abuse at them which I know is very tempting. The spammers are targeting older, single males and sadly, some actually think these a genuine women who are interested in them. The dating scam/spam business is very lucrative, as I previously stated above; this is being carried out by real human beings, not some 'bot' software, who are being paid to create these profiles across all the Swingers Heaven sites in the world.

Feel free to ask any questions, I will always do my best to answer them.

Thanks for the update Seamus, appreciate the effort by you and the moderator/admin time.