We are currently being swamped by fraudulent orders by people operating out of Spain and Nigeria. Does anyone have any idea how I can block these people as so far they have tried to place £250,000 worth of orders in the past week? Also, is there a police department set up to deal with this? Thanks

Hi Jonathan,

At what stage in your process do you identify that they are fraudsters (without giving too much away) ?

Im not sure what your business is or currently provides, but not everyone from Spain and Nigeria would be fraudsters so whatever process you have, you need to ensure that the rouge traders are sent away and the legitimate ones can still continue trading with you. IP blocking will not work.

What are your processes for verifying and validating a credit card or authorisation of payment? This is an area that I would study and strengthen the process.

As for reporting the crime, your best bet is to get in touch with the local police in your area and see what they can do, they should have at least one or two detectives who work on e-crime or organised crime. If that does not help or you dont get much further try http://www.soca.gov.uk/index.html and see if anyone can help you.

If you want to talk further then send us an email and we can discuss your buying process and how to strengthen it against rogue buyers.

By the way I got scammed couple of K on my credit card this Xmas so I understand your pain, the transactions took place in China, and no I did not visit that country!

Hanif Rehman
hanif.rehman@dyneconsultancy.com
www.dyneconsultancy.com

we block country IP ranges and then specifically the IPs of anyone who makes a fraudulent transaction.

It's a quick and dirty solution that seems to work for us

Hi Jonathan, you need to modify the .htaccess, this file usually resides at your websites root folder.

If you do not have a .htaccess document on your server you need to create one.

The easiest way to create an .htaccess document is to create a document in notepad and call it i.e. htaccess.txt. Past the blocking information into this the document (listed below). Following you upload htaccess.txt on to your server with your favorite FTP client. Once uploaded you rename the htaccess.txt document to .htaccess. (Note: take care that the dot is kept before htaccess).

The list of IPs are based on Nigeria, do note this is going to block Nigeria as a whole and was generated automatically by an IP address tracking software.
<Limit GET HEAD POST>
order allow,deny
deny from 41.204.224.0/19
deny from 41.205.160.0/19
deny from 41.206.0.0/19
deny from 41.206.224.0/19
deny from 41.211.192.0/18
deny from 41.220.64.0/20
deny from 41.222.40.0/21
deny from 41.222.64.0/21
deny from 41.222.72.0/21
deny from 41.223.24.0/22
deny from 41.223.64.0/22
deny from 41.223.128.0/22
deny from 41.223.136.0/22
deny from 62.173.32.0/19
deny from 62.193.160.0/19
deny from 80.248.0.0/20
deny from 80.250.32.0/20
deny from 82.128.0.0/17
deny from 195.166.224.0/19
deny from 196.1.176.0/20
deny from 196.3.60.0/22
deny from 196.3.180.0/22
deny from 196.29.208.0/20
deny from 196.45.192.0/18
deny from 196.46.144.0/22
deny from 196.46.240.0/21
deny from 196.200.0.0/20
deny from 196.200.64.0/20
deny from 196.200.112.0/20
deny from 196.202.224.0/21
deny from 196.207.0.0/20
deny from 196.207.128.0/18
deny from 196.216.144.0/22
deny from 196.216.148.0/22
deny from 196.220.0.0/19
deny from 212.100.64.0/19
deny from 217.14.80.0/20
deny from 217.78.64.0/20
deny from 217.117.0.0/20
deny from 81.18.32.0/20
deny from 81.24.0.0/20
deny from 213.166.160.0/19
deny from 213.181.64.0/19
allow from all
</LIMIT>

Hope it helps, but do note its blocking the country Nigeria as a whole.

Kind regards,
Hanif
                   

or you could go for www.blockacountry.com

Hope it helps