How to stop these scams...
FORTUNE: Online scams create "Yahoo! millionaires" - May 29, 2006
It's insanely simple, it makes you wonder why nobody has done it yet.
Configure all routers to deny IP addresses coming from Nigeria. Period. eBay can do it, Yahoo! can do it, ANYBODY can do it. It's a simple matter of creating a deny rule on a firewall or router. If you know that a certain block of addresses come from Nigeria, you can stop the vast majority of scamming from this country with one or two commands.
ONE OR TWO COMMANDS!
It's insanely simple, it makes you wonder why nobody has done it yet.
Configure all routers to deny IP addresses coming from Nigeria. Period. eBay can do it, Yahoo! can do it, ANYBODY can do it. It's a simple matter of creating a deny rule on a firewall or router. If you know that a certain block of addresses come from Nigeria, you can stop the vast majority of scamming from this country with one or two commands.
ONE OR TWO COMMANDS!
posted by xanadian at 9:23 AM
4 Comments:
As featured on Slate! http://www.slate.com/id/2142419/ (near the bottom) Ego FTW!
On a more serious note: Putting in one or two commands to filter IP addresses IS an easy tast...per firewall. The more difficult part is that there are MANY routers and firewalls between (for example) eBay and Nigeria.
But it can be done. I should state that it's "relatively" easy. eBay and other content providers, however, CAN individually set up their security to deny whole blocks of IP addresses. But that's a piecemeal solution.
Brilliant. As long as Nigeria remains nationally ignorant of proxy servers, that'll work just great.
hmm...yes, anonymous proxy servers are something I hadn't considered. I suspect that a service could be created (if it isn't already) that businesses, that can be the target of con artists, can subscribe to. The service would have a "blacklist" of all anonymous proxy servers. It starts to become a little less "easy" I suppose.
The reason I'm so switched on about this topic is because my father got scammed (in a different way, but over the Internet, for all intents and purposes) out of almost $100k. http://retirednoway.blogspot.com has more.
I once bothered to trace a Nigerian who tried to scam my Yahoo account. He gave a return mailing address so I changed that to www......com and tried to log on. I was immediately on an EGYPTIAN portal's site and I could have created my own free email account there. According to Spampal, quite a few Chinese and Japanese portals have no security and are used by spammers. If so the Nigerians can go there. Spampal accordingly has settings so you can lower the spam threshhold on emails from China and Japan if you wish.
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