How to block user without blocking their ISP

using htaccess or another way?

[soquinn]

I have a client who has been attacked recently with fraudulent ads on their site to solicit escrow payment deposits. Most of these people attempting the scam are connect through AOL so it is difficult to pin point their location and or block them in .htaccess. I was wondering if there is a way to block them without blocking all AOL?

Example log:

IP Address: 64.12.116.208
ISP: cache-mtc-ad14.proxy.aol.com

[steelegbr]

My solution would probibally (I hate to say it) cookies placed on each of your users giving them a unique ID then the ID can be logged in a database with their IP data.

When an attack takes place look for the latest entry for that IP and block the cookie id on each of your pages with a note like "YOU ARE BANNED FROM THIS SITE".

The only downfalls are that users block and delete cookies constantly and it requires server side technologies for the database and cookies.

If anybody has any better solutions, please post them!

[soquinn]

Thanks steelegbr… that might work but I think the scammers are somewhat organized and technically savvy, that’s way they use AOL or satellite connections and not a local ISP so our geo-targeting is difficult. The sites are country specific so we’ve tried blocking IP ranges like 555.555.555.0/24 if the source ISP was troublesome but we can’t do that with AOL?