From: "Geo" 

"Mike N."  wrote in message
news:2ubhj2dea9ia05crpefleottsllivhrl1v{at}4ax.com...

>    A good trick I saw for the spammers problem of signing up for free
> Webmail accounts, then spamming Nigerian scams is where the signup would
> require a Paypal deposit of 0.01 for 5 years of usage.   This has cut the
> Nigerian scams to zero - they all move on to something easier.

That would stop me from using it as well since I don't have a paypal account.

We had a problem years ago with spammers signing up for dialup accounts
then spamming and getting kicked off the service and then never paying for
the first month.

We started a requirement that to sign up you need to give us a valid phone
number, we then call you back at that number to take the rest of your
signup information. This cut spammers completely off the service, of course
this was prior to the spambot issues since now they just root a bunch of
valid innocent customers to do the same thing but the technique is the
same, make signup non-anonymous and the spammers leave for easier marks.

Geo.

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