"NO" to proxy hosting

A

aeromit

New member
I have spoken to a few friends of mine who work for different web hosting companies and all of them they told me, they are receiving increasing number of fraudulent orders from anyone who uses proxy hosting plans. I don't know guys do you have the same issues but the more proxies web hosts give to users the more fraud will come to online merchants.
 
Well the will be many that can disagree but in order to hunt for new customers some shared web hosts (let's not list names for now) are willing even to tolerate fraud.
 
We use MaxMind and it scores open proxies as very high.

I agree - I see no reason why someone has to use a proxy to sign up for our service. I suppose in the odd case someone might be at school or work and cannot get to our site to sign up, but in that case they can just wait until they get home to sign up.
 
It is one of the first things to check on an order if there is a proxy on it chances are it will be fraudulent, I agree that some people may need to use them but at least 90% of the time it's not the case.
 
Some sites do not allow visitors from my country. I guess it's OK if they don't want customers from where I live, but it does mean that a foreign citizen working here on a temporary basis would have to use a proxy to visit and purchase.
 
Well what I did was just call the user. Yeah, I spend money on long distance charges, but hey! I'm safe this way. If I make a call and have a user saying "what? i never got hosting" Well then I let them become aware of something using their CC and ordering. Otherwise it's a normal checkup on customers to see how their doing.
 
Harry said:
Well what I did was just call the user. Yeah, I spend money on long distance charges, but hey! I'm safe this way. If I make a call and have a user saying "what? i never got hosting" Well then I let them become aware of something using their CC and ordering. Otherwise it's a normal checkup on customers to see how their doing.
Click to expand...
Agree with you here. I do the same when I want to check up web hosting company's activity.
 
There really is no reason why a user should signup through a proxy and not expect a pause on their order or additional waiting time. If they infact do need to signup for via a proxy, than they should get no the phone, live chat, or e-mail and let the receiving company know of their curcumstances.

Any order that I see through a proxy of any short, is dumped into the fraud pile and e-mail sent to them that their order could not be processed. If they are not fraud, they usually contact and provide further verification. 99.9% of proxy orders, are fraud from my experience.
 
I can also add that there is no need anyone to use a proxy except if they really want to hide. And that why web hosts that advertise proxy hosting services are not appreciated at all... at least from my point of view.
 
We've seen fraud drop to almost zero by denying all orders from:

people using proxies
@hotmail
@aol
@yahoo
all african countries
the far east
 
Harry said:
Well what I did was just call the user. Yeah, I spend money on long distance charges, but hey! I'm safe this way. If I make a call and have a user saying "what? i never got hosting" Well then I let them become aware of something using their CC and ordering. Otherwise it's a normal checkup on customers to see how their doing.
Click to expand...

Wud agree to this approach rather than just blindly denying service to customers....
 
hostingpuppy said:
We use MaxMind and it scores open proxies as very high.

I agree - I see no reason why someone has to use a proxy to sign up for our service. I suppose in the odd case someone might be at school or work and cannot get to our site to sign up, but in that case they can just wait until they get home to sign up.
Click to expand...

yea i use this as well.
 
aeromit said:
I have spoken to a few friends of mine who work for different web hosting companies and all of them they told me, they are receiving increasing number of fraudulent orders from anyone who uses proxy hosting plans. I don't know guys do you have the same issues but the more proxies web hosts give to users the more fraud will come to online merchants.
Click to expand...

Well this is not 100% true , as we have clients who run their Proxy Sites , and they dont seem to be fraudulent.

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othellotech said:
We've seen fraud drop to almost zero by denying all orders from:

people using proxies
@hotmail
@aol
@yahoo
all african countries
the far east
Click to expand...

I personnaly wouldnt use a company that wouldnt allow me to use an email address ending in the above listed(just me) because..im a person that will not ever use my isp email for anything..I never do. although i have 2 others..yahoo and gmail..my yahoo is the one ive had the longest and i get alot of spam in it so i use it mainly for playing around but my gmail is my bussiness one that i use for anything important. My isp email is so damn complicated to use and is not user friendly and so im not comfortable using..now if the host would like someone said, call me or send other emails to varify and such i would be more then willing to do what ever just to get the account set up. I see that the emails above are used for diffrent reasons not legal and such but not to allow them at all is cutting your own hand off in my opinion..lol
 
While we don't outright ban free email addresses during sign up, we do generally trust our Maxmind plugin. As someone already mentioned, Maxmind scores proxies very high and free email addresses relatively high so pretty much any signup with a combination of those will be outright rejected before we even get to see the order.

I suppose it's possible that someone using an open proxy AND a free email address is a legitimate customer, but the odds are so far against it that we'd rather not even take the chance.

There is no shortage of customers on WHT and HD screaming that their host is not honest with them. Well, in my view, starting a relationship with me through a proxy and a free email address puts up some red flags for me that customer isn't being honest with me.

I'm sure we lose a customer or two because of this, but when I compare how well our servers are running now as to how well they were running the beginning when we weren't screening carefully, the trade off is well worth it.
 
Oh..so true.. Dont get me wrong..I do not us proxies..ever..no need to..but the email address is the address everyone i know uses to contact me..yes i do agree that if someone signs up using a proxy and free email address should, at the least part be questioned .
 
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