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Last month, we introduced you to three scams that we’ve seen associated with online event registration. This month, we want to provide you with some tips on how to spot these fraudulent registrations within your database.

If you missed last month’s article or would like to review it, go to:

http://www.eply.com/event_resources/online_registration_articles/online-event-registration-scams.html

Registrant’s Country

From our experience, the majority of fraudulent registrations are from African countries and notably Nigeria. Simply seeing a registration from Nigeria can be your red flag, particularly if you absolutely do not expect registrants to be traveling from that country. If there registrants from the country in question that might attend the event but you are still suspicious, then check a few more of the red flags listed below.

Email Address

Most often, people registering fraudulently do not have a professional email address and are using a Yahoo, Hotmail or other free web-based email address. If the event is of a professional nature, this should be a warning sign.

Professional Designation

Again, if the event is of professional nature and you are collecting information such as job title or designation, fraudulent registrants often won’t enter any data into these fields or will enter something fairly generic, such as professor or manager.

Company Name

The company name might also sound quite general, made up or simply not be the type of company that would be associated with your event. For example, a few company names that were submitted for a conference of school administrators were: “Maxcon Investments & Construction Com. Ltd.”, “7up Bottling company p.l.c” and “De-Funlab and Son Nigeria Enterprises”.

Name on Credit Card

While people often register for an event using somebody else’s credit card such as a manager’s or president’s, you’ll probably raise your eyebrows if you see that Sally Jones’ card was used to register somebody from Nigeria. This could indicate that the credit card that was used is stolen.

Letter of Invitation Request

The motive behind fraudulently registering for an event can be to have a pretense for entering the country. As part of a visitor visa application, a letter of invitation from the event organizer is generally required and you will likely field such requests.

Request to Pay Onsite

The registrant might contact you claiming that they are having difficulty arranging payment from their country and request permission to pay for the event registration fees onsite.

Multiple Registration Attempts

Commonly, there will be multiple attempts to register due to declined credit card transactions. With the ePly system, registrations with declined credit cards are entered into the database as it’s important to consider all data and this can help you determine the validity of these registrations.

Spelling and Grammar

If your event is international, you certainly might not expect all registrants to have perfect English spelling and grammar. However, this should apply more to data such as special dietary requests and not company name. For example, “Maxcon Investments & Constrution Com. Ltd.” was actually submitted in a fraudulent registration as “Maxcon Investments&constrution coy ltd”. It’s also common to see all upper or all lower case.

If you have a feeling that something isn’t right with one of your registrations it’s always worth a few minutes of investigation.

Next month we will give you some ideas on what to do if suspect a registration in your database is fraudulent and how to deter potential scammers.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or comments about this article.


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