Free fraud and scam detection plugin for Dolphin

Dear Dolphin users,

London, UK (January 26 2009) Univalence Ltd, a London based company established in 2008, is today launching Anatoa, a new online fraud detection service directed at membership based websites run by individual webmasters as well as small and medium companies.

The service addresses both so-called profile scam and abusive members, both major reasons for membership based websites not reaching their full potential.

The typical example of profile scam is the "Nigerian 419 scam", in which organised fraudsters, often based in West Africa, use promises of large amounts of money to defraud people they contact on the Internet.

Anatoa provides a service for detection and automated detection of these fraudsters, using WebServices technology and ready-made plugins for 20 of the most popular software packages used by websites today. By combining input from all members of the service, new fraudsters are quickly detected and prevented from conducting their activity on all members' websites. The service is free for most websites, with charging models coming into account for those with a large member base.

The Anatoa service has been in development since mid 2008 and has run in beta for a couple of months to calibrate the detection algorithms against human review of profile activity. Anatoa expects massive take-up of the service now that it is out of its beta phase and the first plugin is available, soon to be followed by another 4 for the most common CSM systems: "We are releasing our automated detection plugin for Dolphin today, soon to be followed by Drupal, Joomla, phpIzabia and osDate. Websites that install the plugin can expect immediate benefits by preventing fraudsters from destroing their growth potential, as well as cleaning up their existing membership database. Once active members, they can display Anatoa's membership logo on their member sign-up form as a further deterrent."

More information can be found at Anatoa's website www.anatoa.com.

Yours truly
Anatoa

Small problem after install get this on index.php, join.php and also in admin - plugins - Anatoa/settings.php

"Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or '}' in /home/sites/sexualliaisons.com/public_html/app/Anatoa/controllers/webservice.ctrl.php on line 30"

please advise...

Dave

So.  Exactly how does this work?  How does this determine what is fraud and what is not?   Is 'Fraud and scam detection' a fancy name for a spam blocker?

So your system will have access to my member's login and passwords?

What happens if you guys are the scammers?

I mean if you have access to my member logins and passwords then you can have access to all their info. Like e-mail.

Well I tried this on a test setup, It did'nt work the pages that you edit throw up the fault above. they say it is only supported by php5 so I switched to that and then it only displayed the headers of the edited files....

EDITED..... Got it to work read post below... Was a Problem with Dolphin Short Tags......

Hello all and thanks for your feedback/questions.

Lancashiredates, as discussed on our ticketing system the plugin requires PHP5 and hopefully your host will be able to configure your PHP5 installation correctly for Dolphin so that you don't get the errors you mentioned.

Houstonlively, the system relies on data gathered from other members of the network. For example if someone abuses members of another website in the network, asking for money or spamming or breaking other rules, that information will be used to flag the same person when he/she signs up for your website. In addition it will analyze messages and images posted on your website using our algorithms to determine if it is likely this is a scammer. So if you compare this to a spam blocker, this system takes it a bit further by adding the collaborative element of a network of other websites. Scammers tend to move from one site to the next once found out, which we can now prevent.

Melia, any Dolphin plugin you choose to install can get access to member's data. To be 100% sure you must always study the source code of the plugin (the Dolphin plugin is available as 100% readable source code). The Anatoa plugin will use your member's IP address and username (not password) in the fraud check. Whether a readable email address is used is configurable. If you do not like to share your email address with us you can turn that off in the plugin's configuration page and it will fall back to using a one-way hash value generated from the email address instead (which basically means the email address cannot be read by us, but we will be able to match it agains the hash of other email addresses).

We do understand your concerns about member's privacy and are taking every measure we can to protect the effort you've made in building up your member database. Thanks again for your interest and we'll be very happy to answer any other questions you might have.

Best regards

Anatoa

Hi anatoa,

After further discussions with my host I found the problem to be dolphin using short tags i.e <? instead of <?php , set short_open_tag=1 in php.ini and that fixed the problem.

just need to get my API now?

That is great - you can find you API key when logging in to your account at anatoa.com. Just copy and paste that into the plugin configuration page of your Dolphin site and press Save.

Regards

Anatoa

We are pleased to announce that a new version of our Dolphin plugin is ready, with support for Dolphin versions 6.1.5 and 6.1.6. It can be downloaded for free from our site anatoa.com.

How do we know that this actually works?

Very easy install and awesome tech support if needed.  Ill report back on how well it works.  This is much needed for my site.  I get a new user almost every day that creates an account then spams my members.

 RE:

Someday, when I get my D7 site online, I'm going to use GeoIP to block about 80% of the planet from accessing my site.  Since my site will be so geographically specific, there will be very little need for users in hundreds of countries around the world to access.... especially the countries where 90% of the hacking and spamming attempts originate.  Thos attempts rarely come from the US.

So it's GeoIP for me.... that's how I'm going to deal with this stuff.  GeoIP can also be used to block all known anonymous proxie servers.