Quote Originally Posted by shari91 View Post
We are actively nabbing scammers even before they hit the store. As I said earlier this is now a major part of my job - much bigger than just day to day Mod stuff. So when someone triggers an alert now, they're nailed. However some people won't trigger one now because their fraud happened before new tools were in place. To determine that fraud, we can fortunately now back check but unless we know to manually check that individual poster because we see something suspicious/another poster alerts us/that poster comes to the store, then unless we had a full time Fraud team working 24/7, it's impossible to go through every poster's account considering we have over 130k members and that number is growing rapidly. Even then, I don't think that'd be even 50% effective because scammers change the activity of their multiple accounts. An account could start off as clean on the system and then a couple of months down the road start making points transfers to the main account. It's impossible to keep track of every points transaction between posters due to the sheer number of them. I kind of compare it to an offshore book. They can't always catch the fraud while someone's actively using the account unless someone thinks to look at that particular user. But when you try to get a withdrawal, that's when they'll nab you if they don't happen to sooner.
Thank again for your help. I have one more question. When someone goes to make a store purchase, how is it they are caught? By that, I mean does someone just enter their name into a fraud detection program and it spits out anything suspect? Or does the investigator have to manually look through the persons history and manually check out anything suspect? It sounds like it is more like the former. If that's the case, then it would not be at all difficult to have a script run through all active pros and return anything suspect. (After all, the new rules make non-pro theft pointless.)

Thaddeus