We've added a feature to the classifieds to help protect sellers and fight scams. In short:
You will have to be a registered user to have access to the contact information of a seller
Interested buyers will initiate contact though an online form on Dropzone.com (only visible to registered users)
Sellers will receive the contact information and message (there's an example below) and can choose to reply or not.
You can forward any potential scam emails to a special "abuse" email that's included with with each message.
Why does this make sense?
This keeps your email address hidden from potential buyers and you choose whether they get it or not by replying, or not.
We have a lot more control over registered users on Dropzone.com and can act quickly against scams.
This makes it a lot more cumbersome for a scammer to get in touch with you. Not only do they have to register an external email address somewhere, but they have to create a dropzone.com account (which can be closed quickly and all email from a domain blocked from future registration
If a scammer registers a Dropzone.com username we immediately have access to the IP address he/she uses to browse the web. We don't have this with emails sent from free mail providers.
Information provided though this form is logged for future reference.
An added benefit is that it provides you with an additional layer of protection against email harvesting robots that grabs addresses from the web for spam lists.
Here's and example of the notification you will get when someone contacts you.
Quote:
Contact information submitted by: (support@dropzone.com) on Tuesday, August 24, 2004 at 07:38:40 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
username: jsmith_dude001 url: http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/classifieds/detail_page.cgi?ID=13005& firstname: John lastname: Smith Email: JohnSmith@myaddress.com city: San Francisco country: United States message: I'm interested in buying the container you're advertising on Dropzone.com. Can you please contact me at your earliest convenience. I'm sitting on a roll of cash and would like to give it to you. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
SCAM ALERT! - Help us protect our users.
If you suspect the person contacting you runs a scam, please forward this email to: (abuse email address here)
