I own www.getpuppies.co.za / www.puppiesforsale.co.za and it gets a LOT of traffic. It's ranked #1 for a lot of high-traffic keywords and my AdWords campaign is simply awesome.
That's all well and good but now with the "success" of the website, I've run into a problem: Scamsters.
They post ads of OTHER people holding pets and use enticing descriptions and focus on the really high-demand breeds. That combination results in a lot of people being scammed.
I've tried a lot of things to try and stop them but none have worked that well:
- Blocking gmail.com, etc (This resulted in non-scammers being blocked)
- Allowing only unique numbers (Not very effective)
- Allowing only unique emails (Also not effective)
- Charging (Almost no one paid)
- Charging less ($0.50 via PayPal - still not many paying advertisers)
- Manual moderation (There are just too many scammy ads posted daily for this to work)
- Only allowing 1 post per user per 7 days (Scammers created LOTS of accounts)
I'm earning a good packet from AdSense (nothing amazing but still good money) so I don't care about charging for ads and have since dropped that but I need a way to validate advertisers so that the site's content can grow again. (I wiped all the old ads in an effort to "clean up" after receiving many scam complaints).
What can I try next?
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