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Comment by gs7 | Hacker News Reader

Congrats. I used to be a big fan of Padmapper until recently and kept recommending it to my friends and family, but I've noticed that it has become a cess pool of scammers. When I encountered one of these scammers and reported them to Padmapper support, I was assured it would be dealt with. This was a month ago and the scammer's profiles are still active on the site (his newer profile still has listings: http://www.padlister.com/profile/show/469392). I emailed Eric directly about it too, but received no further response. I was pretty disappointed by the lack of action on their part and I ended up switching back to Craigslist for my latest apartment search.

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Agh, I'm sorry for not following up, I've been hammered recently, and I've let some things slip as we've been working to transition things. Our anti-scam system works pretty well once the scammer gets a message, but we need to work more on our preemptive scammer banning. They're a crafty bunch, and it takes ongoing work to stay effective at fighting them.

One thing to note, though, is that when we ban them, they get hellbanned, so that it looks to them like they're still up, but their listings just don't show up on the map. If you (or they) go directly to their listing, you can still see it, with the theory that it'll make it harder for them to tell when they've been banned, and make it slower for them to repost. That user you posted was, in fact, already hellbanned.

Also, you can always hit Flag as Bad on the desktop website to report a scam.

That's a good point that it's not very satisfying to report a scam and then have no visual indication that it was taken down, though.

If you're willing to give us another chance and try us out again, and you encounter any scams, please send them along to hello@padmapper.com. We've got a full time customer service person now!

Would requiring postings be tied to a mobile number and using SMS verification slow them down?

Sidenote: Congratulations!

I don't think it would. I messed with this scammer for a good while and I found that they either use Google Voice or apps like Burner to get new, virtual cell phone numbers easily.

It might help, but it's a bit tricky, because there are virtual numbers (Google Voice), and banning those catches real users who use GVoice (like me). It's a tricky balance, and my sense is that like DRM, it usually ends up hurting legitimate users more than bad ones who will just use one of their many workarounds.

One thing we've had good success with in the past, but just couldn't afford once they raised their prices, was Sift Science. We've been meaning to try some of the alternatives to that.

Zumper also has some interesting ideas about it that they've used successfully in the past, that we're planning on integrating.

Having the time to do this (and not focusing on dealmaking) will be really nice :-)

Appreciate the response and with this news I totally get how busy you must have been lately. Also didn't know you had a hellban system; that's smart. In that case, all is forgiven :)

Thanks :-) Better would be a true hellban system that lets them see it on the map and the listing itself, but lets no one else see the listing, even with a direct link, though. Something to add to the todo list!

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