In the last 6 months, we have been getting a lot of bogus out-of-country signups through our online signup form. I believe some people refer to it as "number running". Someone signs up for service on our webpage using publicly available credit card number algorithms and when they hit one that works...jackpot baby time for Vegas! So we end up getting 3-4 signups in a day from credit cards that go through and actually get processed and an account gets setup but never used (the person doing it does not want or need Internet service, they are just finding out if the card number works, and use bogus names, addresses, etc). Eventually, the true owner of the card calls to get their money back. We end up having to delete the account, refund the money, basically losing out altogether, since we don't get the processing fees back. It's getting very annoying and I've actually had to disable automatic signups so that we can manually process signups now, talk about going back to the dark ages! Anyone else run into this before, or have any suggestions on how to log/track/prevent it further using any methods i.e. IIS, Filemaker or other 3rd party tool? We get the IP address of the user, and then block it on IIS but they just use another IP, and who knows how many times they are trying before they get one to work... Thanks, and if you haven't had any problems like this yet, get ready, it's apparently gaining popularity.
Are you sure they aren't using your service? We've had that issue happen just recently. It started around the beginning of November. What the person is doing is signing up, then using the e-mail account that's created to send spam via our webmail interface. Since he was a legit user of our network (Based simply on his signup), we had the ability to e-mail via IMAP... So far I've tracked it to 5 different country's, most likely just compromised machines in those countries... Anyway, it doesn't appear to be a sequential number attack on the signup, since the signup only happens once (No failed attempts)... Shutting down the online signups wasn't an option, so I've just changed it to use the pending status features...Then we don't charge the card, nor create anything on the servers until we speak with the "New" customer...Either for setup or when we call them to verify...It's a pain, but better than turning it off... Funny thing is, the guy/gal keeps using different names, different cards, but the same address in Colorado...Not sure why, but that's the only consistant thing so far...He's, at least for now, stopped, since his last few attempts have resulted in failures...(The last was on New Year's Day)...
Are you sure you have no failed attempts to signup? How do you know? If they put in a bogus card number, opti gives them an error and they can then try again before getting added to opti, that's the point of my question...how do you know if there are failed attempts to signup (let alone block multiple failed attempts)? Your issue sounds the same as ours. We didn't disable online signups either, just set to pending, and the person was using similar addresses, mostly in northern california, with bogus (but legitimate sounding business names). My credit card company suggests filing a report with FBI. Most of these problems have stopped here as well, maybe they finally caught the individual(s). They never used the account for mail as far as we know, just to validate card numbers.
Well...I guess I don't know *for sure*, but in the times surrounding the times of legit sign-ups, there were no log entries at all for the web interface. We don't get a lot of web sign-ups, so they are easy to see...And, I'm referring to the IIS logs, not Optigold/Filemaker logs, in case there was any confusion... Our guy came back Monday night and tried again...Guess he'll keep trying every once in a while just to see if it will work for him or not...