Tired of fake accounts with hotmail, match name with address help

Hi,

I made a start of this code but i need some help.
We're getting tired of frauds trying to make a buck with fake accounts.

What we want to do is block people using the following sort of method:
Their names are normal, like "John James", with an email like "bigman23454@hotmail..."

These accounts are flagged immediately, but i want to prevent them for becoming as member at all. Nothing good comes of these people.

I have this:



Tried this line too:



It does not work 100%. It does some, but not right;-)

Please help.



Paul.

Hi,

filtering a specific email pattern makes no sense to me, since this will also block legitimate users.

Are those "people" you want to get rid of actual people or bots? Because most bots are pretty stupid and can be detected easily by using hidden fields. I also had a problem with massive fake registrations in my forum and could fight them off completely just by making the standard phpbb registration fields hidden. If a user still fills out the fields, it's obviously a bot. The great thing about this is that legitimate users aren't bothered at all (in contrast to captchas).

Its actually a precaution for 'real' cheaters i guess. No bots.
We own a cashback program, these people register and find the stores where they can get most money back, then go to that store and try to fake orders. We have already been canned by 4 stores due to these people that tried to cheat their way into getting cashback.

What works for now, is the following:


However i do of course agree with you on all counts, we just have to make it work, somehow.

I do know however that real, honest people use real, normal emailadresses. If the small % of people that use these weird hotmail addresses get halted by this method, i do present them with a nice note explaining why. I am sure they will not be offended.

Any other method is welcome.

What i am wondering though is, where do all these people come from. They outnumber the amount of real members at this time (this week only). Our stats show no referrers so it is hard to pinpoint where they come from. A dead giveaway is the different IP's they use, which we DO keep track of.

I'd still try hidden fields, because I can hardly believe that those frauds actually fill out the registration fields by hand. The registration is probably done by bots and only the orders by actual people (if at all).

Apart from that, there's no technical solution for this problem. If those people aren't completely braindead, they'll soon figure out that you have blacklisted hotmail addresses, and they'll simply switch to gmail or whatever.

They already tried with gmail, mail15, rocketmail. All added to my routine and registrations stopped immediately after that. For now;-)