So I had a few sign-ups last night and one of them stuck out for some reason and I'm sitting here really racking my brain over how I should handle it. So far everything checks out... IP and country match up (address definately looks fake though), no fraud report from Maxmind (not sure if this was an error but never generated a fraud score at all, even a 0.0), and payment was sent very quickly (albeit from an unverified account with no address)... but I still can't help but feel this is a bad client. When you have a gut feeling about something do you play it safe or do you wait it out?

Well if the client provided a phone number I usually call them and confirm that they actually signed up for a hosting account.

If they are using PayPal, I login to PayPal to see who's name is on the account, and make sure the person I called is the same person that owns the PayPal account.

It's simply more of a verification process which some clients like anyway. However, just waiting it out could lead to the client thinking your response time is very long and may lead to a lost client or negative review.

If the phone number is fake, or email address, I would simply just refund the payment and cancel the order to be on the safe side, even if it was a large sum of money you received for the order. In most cases, it is a fraud order.

Hope that helps.

You could always ask for photo ID as that normally stops fraudsters in their tracks

Well once the invoice was paid the account was activated so when I said "wait it out" I meant for either something bad to happen or nothing to happen after they logged into their account.

And as for calling them, they are in a completely other country so we have a time difference and a probable language barrier.

Waiting for something bad to happen is never a great option and I'm sure anyone can agree with that here.

As for calling them, look up their country by the information they provided through the sign up and find out what time zone they are in, or better yet, email them if the email address is legitimate.

If they speak another language and your site is in English, I don't understand how they were able to sign up in the first place, unless they had someone else to perform that for them.

That's just the way I'd go about it, but waiting would never come across as an option for me. I hope all goes well whatever you decide to do.

If you're worried about the order, give the client a call. If the phone number doesn't work, mark the order as fraud.

Problem solved. TOS violation within the first few hours.

if you don't mind me asking, what was the violation.

It funny but you need to go with your gut instinct. You thought something was up and you were right.

WEll done! Can't beat good old 'gut instinct' sometimes. It's quite affirming when that happens. Warm and fuzzy. ;)

It is funny how you can have these gut instincts that turn out to be right on the money.

Out of curiosity what did he break out of the TOS?

Usually it's the name that's a little weird, as well as the address. Sometimes it's also the domain that's a give away, but all you can do is wait it out if you don't have any grounds to stand on.

Good job.

We see - on average - one EVERY day of the week is fraud

These people need to get a life

we he a spammer??

We see - on average - one EVERY day of the week is fraud

These people need to get a life


Just one? We see two or three an hour.

We have maxmind set to a very low threshold so it marks quite a few as fraud which we manually check. There's always a few that don't pass and we often see the fraud score maxed out at 10.00

He wasn't a spammer. He violated a section of the TOS requiring clients to keep their information updated and accurate at all times. After further checking it was found that the information was not accurate at all and after contacting the client he has since changed the information but we are having it verified before unsuspending the account.

You could always ask for photo ID as that normally stops fraudsters in their tracks

Yes, sometimes but then again a lot of people are REALLY GOOD at photoshopping ID's, credit cards, etc. It's just another tool to use.

We had a customer who kept ordering unmetered servers which looked really suspicious. Even though we had ID on file I decided to tell him there is a $X cut off on credit cards and we would require wire transfer. Sure enough he started paying by wire.