Is there a way to block people from registering based on name, email, IP or something else? I have one person that keeps registering and making a purchase with PayPal, then will dispute the charge, get his money back. Just to register again.
The service I see is time-sensitive and updated daily so he is reaping the benefits and scamming me out of money.
Hi Brian,
s2Member doesn’t have a registrations banning feature… It does temp ban logins as part of the Brute Force and Unique IP restrictions, but not as you describe for registrations.
You could search for a plugin that adds registration bans, but and I don’t know if it’d help, he’d just need to use a different email or IP to get back in…
It’d seem to be more helpful to find out if PayPal lets you block someone’s account, that is not something he can replace as easily… But after a while of searching, I couldn’t find how, Paypal doesn’t give a way for a business block a buyer.
On another site I was using a different e-commerce shop and passing credit card data on to the processor.
I found that on a number of similar sites, there was a user or bot that was creating an account using the same physical name and address but different IP addresses and different email addresses. It appeared they would add some items into the cart and attempt to check out, probably testing the date and/or CVV security code.
I finally hacked the account creation code and added 2 IF’s. If the name used (that of a particular famous person) or the street address matched, rather than abruptly telling them what was up, I created an error message that said that the database was corrupted, and they could not create the account. Thus, they thought it was a problem for everyone, but it was just their account creation that was thwarted.
So if you can find code that perhaps blocks by IP adrdress to sign up, there mmight be a way to add some other check that keeps them from creating the account. In my case it was simple because the name and address were always the same. You appear to have found something common with this user that you may be able to trap.
That’s a great idea!
Payment wise you can block users based on multiple criteria like Credit Card’s fingerprint, IP, name, address etc. You can also force certain payments to go into a review queue, so you can at least not allow the user access to the content (or remove it quickly). Stripe’s dispute fees are awfully high and s2Member doesn’t use a checkout method Stripe accepts to be covered by their chargeback insurance plan, sadly.
On PayPal things are much harder, though. There’s just no way to block someone over there but it’s also much easier to win a dispute if you can demonstrate the user is commiting fraud. Stripe just won’t help us in the same manner, they just “blame it on the bank” and say it’s “not their problem” to help us if the payer’s bank decides to favor their customer (it frequently does even when their own customer contacts the bank, sometimes they take forever and revert the case in your favor after a month, two or even three, but usually when a subscriber WANTS to pay you and deals with their bank).
There’s plugins to block users, so you do NOT delete their account but you keep them in your database, but blocked. There’s also plugins that can block users from registering if their new accounts match certain criteria.
There’s no foolproof method, sadly. I guess it’s a fact of life. The chargeback system is just awful and you need to account for those losses as a business cost. 