Hi,

Does anyone here have particular problems with fraudulent hosting requests from 'free' (i.e. hotmail etc.) email accounts? Do you, in fact, allow sign-ups from such accounts?

I started allowing sign-ups from them a little while back but recently I've noticed a few rejected card attempts coming through, virtually all from free email accounts.

Just curious to know other hosts' philosophies on this.

Regards,

I agree with this, the free email accounts can sometimes be trouble... However when you think about it, they may not want (or know about) an ISP email, and when they buy hosting they will then have an email address at their domain name. Some of them may be genuine.

Never give a customer the account before they have paid, but you probably know that. :) If the payment doesn't come through correctly, discard the customer until they email you apologizing, that's when you know they're genuine.

Many of our signups use a free hotmail like email address, however most of these are local and apart from the email quirk, are completely non fraudulent.

On the other hand, if you had automatic signup and were getting many signups from everywhere, it would be a different story :)

Gordon, I always sign up for services with my hotmail account not because I don't have an ISPs account, but because I find it more convenient and it is especially intended for services sign-ups. However, I spend hundreds that way and do not conider myself a bad customer. Always pay my bills. :D

If you guys start eliminating free e-mail address sign-ups, then you'll lose some good customers.

I personally do NOT allow them..
I feel a 'real' account to ISP is most reliable for correspondence between customer and my support staff.

They can easily set hotmail or many othe free accounts to grab the email from ISP account, if they prefer to use those accounts for daily email.

At one time I had banned most free email accounts, but received MANY complaints. So I enabled a few of the largest ones (ie. hotmail, yahoo, etc) and it has helped a great deal. A lot of people use these as their primary accounts and don't bother with their ISP.

You will stop a lot more fraud by doing some manual order checks such as verifing the location of the IP with the user's location and double checking CC/billing info.