passport scam

[jeffreyrednor]

i have now received 2 PnP emails that are passport scams. please address this.
thank you
jeff rednor

[mikegreen]

There were some spam posts that were made earlier.. but no emails as far as I can tell.

Can you forward the email to [email protected]?

[mikegreen]

Got it, Jeff, thanks.

So usually we have some Russian/Chinese/Ukranian auto-bot compromise a server based in the US (as we have most bad tech countries blocked), then makes an account, then posts some spam in a few forums. They usually do *not* post in the trip forum as they have to put in a valid zip code/etc.

Appears this one was a human that decided to post in there too, resulting in the trip notifications.
Unfortunately, the 2 posts you got notified from were deleted instead of being moved to the private 'Spam Post' area where we can review. I'll ping the mods and make sure they move vs delete so we can investigate.

A long time ago, there was discussion about new members not being able to post until they were manually reviewed/allowed. This causes problems as a volunteer org of having people available to do such validation, especially on a weekend or holiday when we do have new folks sign up to post a trip request.

I am doing an upgrade of the forum software in the coming weeks which has a few new anti-spam-signup features. We're down to about 2-3 spam accounts created per month now, when before some countermeasures it was 2-3 per week. With the new software we should be able to look at some more features - such as looking at the contents of a post (ie, does it smell like spam/fake) and block notifications being sent.