Fighting Online Dating Scammers

eRomance.com today announced completion of a sophisticated 7-layer filtering system, aimed at containing online scammers that seek to victimize other community members. “The system has been created to keep the community safe and to keep the scammers out,” says Neal Cabage, founder of eRomance.com.

(PRWEB) September 1, 2006 -- eRomance.com today announced completion of a sophisticated 7-layer filtering system, aimed at containing online scammers that seek to victimize other community members. “The system has been created to keep the community safe and to keep the scammers out,” says Neal Cabage, founder of eRomance.com.

“In the early days after our initial Beta launch, I was appalled to see how quickly the scammer community caught on to our site and began signing up en masse. It was rather unfortunate that this happened because it required us to halt development of new features and focus our efforts on creating a serious for this problem,” says Cabage. “We have been manually containing the perpetrators for a couple of months now, since we identified reliable criteria, but with the release of this new system, our ability to predict and contain these guys will go for good to excellent," says Cabage.

For some background on the problem, there is a significant and growing scam industry based in Northwestern Africa, in countries such as Nigeria and Ghana, where people make a lot of money on everything from credit card fraud to identity theft. 2006 appears to have been a breakout year for scams on online dating and community scammers. Scammers join online communities and pose as members from inconspicuous places such as Ohio, establish a relationship with an unsuspecting member, and begin to ask for money once a trust has been established.

“When we identified the problem we immediately took action to answer back with a strong response and now I think we are in an excellent place moving forward. As a result, I expect that we will have one of the safest online dating communities out there – especially among the free dating site,” says Cabage. “Most of the free dating sites are not going to invest the money or be sophisticated enough in many cases to respond to this problem effectively. I think this is a big (and growing) issue that will really begin to separate the serious online communities from those that aren’t, and I’m very happy to be addressing this issue proactively.”

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