Thinking something is up here ? Fraudulent Registrations ??

For the past month or two I have received 30+ Registrations that have either used AT&T, Google, Microsoft or Apple as the Company name of these new customers.
Each time that have used a mix of First and last names of "billaa" and "Hilton" . they have used others but I deleted them and just can't remember them at this time.

In all cases they do sign up with a U.S address ( most of them from Atlanta,GA ) and they all use a email address ending with 163.com
upon doing a search, I find that the 163.com has something to do with China.

Now every time that I get a registration like this, I just delete their account.
I'm wondering if there is a way to stop this ? or is it just the normal Spam type things that happen ?
Also, any idea what they have Planned ??

I will note that there has never been a log in yet from any of these registrations.

I currently use v1.3.9h

Thanks for your help

1. 163.com is like the hotmail of china. Huge free email service. Very often used by spammers.

2. A common pattern of misuse of bogus registrations is simply to come back to your store later and use the Contact Us or Tell A Friend forms for sending spam.

Deleting them is a good idea.

There are several forum discussions in the Concerns About Hack Attempts area where other people have asked the same question because of very similar symptoms. And the "attack" later was in Tell A Friend abuse.
If your site doesn't need to use the Tell A Friend feature, remove it from your site.

Thank you for the reply.

I don't have a tell a Friend feature, but I see now that each one has subscribed to my Newsletter. So maybe they plan on doing that way ?
That makes sense....

I did check out a few threads in the Hack Attempts. Some were similar, and I could see the tie ins.
Guess there's nothing to really stop them other than what i have been doing.

Thanks Again

We used to have the same problem before so we installed the CSS anti spam for registration. It works great! Do a search on here for CSS anti spam and it will lead you to the forum thread which explains how you do it.

Decostyle:

We used to have the same problem before so we installed the CSS anti spam for registration. It works great! Do a search on here for CSS anti spam and it will lead you to the forum thread which explains how you do it.

Thanks, will look into it.

DrByte:

1

2. A common pattern of misuse of bogus registrations is simply to come back to your store later and use the Contact Us or Tell A Friend forms for sending spam.

Deleting them is a good idea.

Can they actually use the Contact Us form?

Yes, anybody can use that. If you have v1.5.1, I understand the CSS antispam is built in, so they may be limited.

gjh42:

Yes, anybody can use that. If you have v1.5.1, I understand the CSS antispam is built in, so they may be limited.

There's a website that keeps creating accounts.

I have v1.5 and will update to 1.5.1 asap. I do not have the Tell a Friend feature on.

I was under the impression that the contact us form would only email to us. Is that not correct ? please advise.

Anybody can use your contact-us form. No account required.

DrByte:

Anybody can use your contact-us form. No account required.

Yes I know that, but when anybody use this form, they can't email to anyone but us, correct?

The built-in contact-us form can only be used to send emails to the email addresses you've entered in your store's Admin->Configuration->Email Options settings.

DrByte:

The built-in contact-us form can only be used to send emails to the email addresses you've entered in your store's Admin->Configuration->Email Options settings.

Thanks for confirming!