For a while I thought only the small internet dating site such as mine were targeted by Nigerian scammers. But I soon realized that all websites, not just online dating sites were afflicted with an element of scammers. Well how do I know you ask, I tell you how I found out.
I have been checking every IP address of new members for origin of country. Any IP from Nigeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Ukraine, I block them from joining. I must say that I have done a pretty good job, because lately the scammers have been pleading to join my dating site, sending me emails to approve them. My logical conclusion is that nobody will plead to be accepted on a dating site when there are so many choices of online dating websites. Getting to my point, sometime ago I read on a dating website administrator’s forum that a site owner had discovered that the scammers was using their yahoo email password on the dating site. She got into the idiot’s yahoo account and changed his password. Well, it must have been the same idiot Nigerian criminal who joined my personals site. I traced the source IP to an ISP in Nigeria, tried the password on the yahoo site and I was in. The first thing I did was to change the password, then I monitored the emails for the next few days. This jerk was a member on every dating and social networking site I can think of. There were emails coming in from his Myspace account, OkCupid, facebook, and many more. The jerk even sent an email to his own account pleading “Please return my password to me�.