My friend Auren Hoffman just wrote a very interesting article on the growing cost consumer Internet companies face fighting scamming, phishing, hacking and government requests. He estimates that it’s a tax of around 25% in terms of inherent time, resource and mindshare.

Based on our experience at OLX, I would definitely agree. Every day we delete 40% of the new ads posted. That’s around 25,000 ads deleted per day in addition to the ones caught automatically by our spam/scam software! We also deal with numerous scams. As a result, almost half of our employees are dedicated to dealing with this problem.

You can read the full article at:
http://summation.typepad.com/summation/2008/05/black-hat-tarif.html

  • This is a big number. How many employees do you have for this scam catching procedure?
    Also, care to share what kind of automated methods do you use to catch spam and scam? If possible maybe in a private discussion.

    We are still new in the free classifieds market with http://www.kugli.com however we grow day after day and fight with the same problems. We also have automated methods to catch scammers and spammers but unfortunately human intervention can never be eliminated.

    Reply