It’s not just Nigerians that are trying to get people’s money. It’s a lot of countries in Africa. Countries like Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire and oddly enough, America. Yes, there are scammers in American trying to get your money. Wikipedia stats that the top 3 are United States, United Kingdom and Nigeria (In that order).
The scam basically tries to trick you into wiring them money. So, good rule, don’t wire anyone you’ve met on the Internet money. Not even if it’s 20 million dollars. Trust me, it’s a scam.
OK, so, how do you as a dating site owner protect yourself? Glad you asked. We have a few features in the dating software that keeps these jackwads from targeting your members. One of the features is the Spam Filter. All you do is put known scammer words in there and the software does the rest. If someone tries to email someone with those words, it locks their account and lets you know. A tool in the admin area also lets you see the contents of that email as well as others.
Another tool is the Blacklist Tool. This tool works by taking a user and once Blacklisted, they can never use the system again and it keeps track of their username and their IP address. For example, say you got a member trying to email other members scam emails. All you need to is take their username and add it to the Blacklist and that’s it. They’re banned and can’t use it again.
These two tools will help you combat scammers and spammers but also, keep check on your profile base. If you’re a niche market dating site running out of Tulsa, Oklahoma then you should not have dating site profiles coming out of New York. This is a known scammer profile type. Also, be looking for verbiage in the profiles that give a lot of praise to God. As strange as that sounds, these scammers put words like “God Fearing” in their profile to make them seem safe. They are not.
So, in closing, use the tools that are in the WordPress dating software and keep these Dating Site Spammers at bay.