Banning a whole country from visiting a site.

Implications of banning a whole country ip range

[Onders]

We've had a lot of problems of fraudsters from a particular country (naming no names!) coming to our site and being destructive / trying to commit fraud / trying to con money from others.

There is no benefit to us of anyone from these specific places coming to our website - and am thinking of putting in some ip geolocation system to ban them from the site (show a different homepage with some text saying the site is unavailable or something is similar)

Two things that I wonder about:

a) Implications for Google. As far as I know all google datacentres are in the states so they shouldn't be affected / see what I'm doing. So there should be no impact on my rankings... or am i wrong on this? Google is not someone I want to upset..

b) Implications with regards to users. This is probably the wrong place to ask this question, but once "rejected" there may be a chance of people cloaking their ip address or similar things to get round what we have implemented. This suggests that maybe I have to be a bit cleverer...

Has anyone had any experience of this or any ideas on what to do?

Thanks!

[whitenight]

we've banned certain countries and had no problems.

Haven't needed to think of more "clever" ways to prevent fraud charges.

Here's the deal. Credit card scammers know they have about 6 hours max to buy stuff before the CC companies notice the abnormal charges and start reversing charges.
So scammers aren't going to waste time switching proxies and verifying their charges. They simply go thru the first page of a keyword-term products and buy as quickly as possible.

As far as "lost sales".. heh, the countries we banned were not buying anything other than from stolen cards anyways, so we haven't lost any revenue.

[Onders]

Thanks whiteknight - what do you show people you ban? Is it just a page of text telling them they are not allowed to view the site? Or do you allow them to view parts of the site anyway?

I've actually also found that our payment processor has a way where you can defer taking money out of people's accounts - effectively until their legitimacy can be verified by us... that's just an aside!

Thanks!

[whitenight]

Is it just a page of text telling them they are not allowed to view the site?

yep. that's pretty much it.

and yes, they're banned from the entire site, but i guess if i wasn't being lazy I could allow them to view the purely informational pages.
But why waste the bandwidth?

[mattb]

We use GeoIP to only allow users in the US and Canada the ability to see the whole site. Everyone else can not see the price or the Add to Cart button. We buy from companies overseas so often we have to send a link to a product that we are having sourced. This way they have access to the image, technical details but not the price.

[Onders]

Thanks guys - I suppose if I wanted to be really cheeky I could show them some adsense!