Fraudsters

Despite a couple of technical problems, the first major hassle was fraudsters entering the site and spamming the members with 419 fraud, or advance fee fraud. The term 419 comes from the section of the Nigerian statute that deals with advance fee fraud. This has a long and ignoble history across the world, and came to be associated with Nigerian scammers initially. On AfrikaDating, we found most of our scammers were from Senegal. Nonetheless there are several well known scams that are collectively known as 419 fraud. The simplest thing about advance fee fraud is that it promises great returns if a small investment is made NOW. The most typical type of scams are on the next page.

The immediate problem for me was that having made the site as open and as easy to use as possible, people were entering it for illegal and immoral purposes, possible damaging the members, and I needed to set up a security system using PHP and MySQL that would kick them out and keep the site safe. This I did, how it works is explained in a little more detail in the forum.

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