Scam / Fraud contacts from CONTACT form

[Aficionado]

The last month or two i have people registering normally and then use Contact form to contact a lot of posters of ads.

They contact them telling them they want to invest and other scam/fraud data.

I have no idea how i can solve this.

Anyone else has encountered and SOLVED that ? I mean some kind of moderation maybe, filtering or  whatever  ?


Thanks

[muratbora]

Unfortunatelly, no solution for this, I have seen many advertising sites ( dating sites ) are preventing to send same messages more than 5-7 times, they use a plugin or function for this...You can try same thing if you are good write php codes into functions,

Probably this person also sending same message to all peoples ( copy / paste ), you can also disable copy / paste function into contact form...This is an another technique, he / she will be bored to type same messages each time...

[mgjfandroid]

Google captcha does not help?

[Aficionado]

Google captcha does not help?

Nope because those are not bots but real-human people. From Africa, Cameroon etc etc.

[Resta]

Afficionado,

Anyone else has encountered and SOLVED that ?

If someone hasn't encountered this problem then it is because they just don't know about it but as long as you have a website with contact forms, it is a given that scammers will use the contact form. The more users you have on the website the more scammers will use the contact form - also competitors too.  This is the oldest trick and in the old days it used to be mostly Nigerians/Africans pulling this scam but now this is from users elsewhere too.

I mean some kind of moderation maybe, filtering or  whatever  ?

I have raised this issue before and email moderation (like comment moderation is the only way) - first there should be a limit that admin can setup as to how may emails a user is allowed to send per day or per hour or based on levels or payments (such as new member, paid member or verified member, etc.,) - even then the admin can choose another option to review all emails and delete spam and forward the rest because for examples a spammer will usually send several emails - most legit users won't be interested in more than 2 or 3 times during a visit. 

For most websites moderation should not take more than 10 minutes to check and delete or forward good emails.  This should be made to work with the contact stats plugin. There was user p206ab who had mentioned that they were thinking of making this and I see that the user is active and just posted in the google api forum, but did not comment and may be you can ask if they are still working on this.

https://forums.osclass.org/plugins/no-more-inquiry-spam/msg158981/#msg158981

[Aficionado]

Well, all in all, apparently there is NO solution for that.

[muratbora]

Did you try to block " copy & paste " funtion into submit form?

[p206ab]

I was mentioned above, so I feel the need to reply.
Yes, I was thinking about making admin moderation, but I'm not good with making plugins, I know how to insert things directly into the code, but not how to make the admin panels, so I kind of left that idea for a while now, but eventually I'll have to do it, because I still get some scammers and some "viagra" inquiries..

What my idea was, that each inquiry once submitted would be temporary stored in a database and admin would have a panel in admin menu where all the inquiries would be displayed. Each inquiry will then have Approve/Reject button (additionally also ban to connect with ban plugin), so admin will manually approve inquiry, if it finds it legit. Only then it will be sent to the seller email or deleted from database table, if it's a scam.

This, I believe would be the best way to stop your users getting emails they do not want. A bit more work for you, but effective and great for your users.

For starters, where is the controller for the item contact form located?

[dev101]

You have 'pre_contact_post' hook, which can be used with existing plugins or expand to 3rd party services (e.g. akismet), so at least some basic anti-spam filtering can be achieved.