Blocking Thieves, Scammers, Spiders - Nigerians, Russians etc

I added a tonne of IPs to the .htaccess file but it slows the hell out of the dedicated server even, which is old, but not too old.

I'm interested to know what others are using to stop these guys from constantly spidering and trying to create accounts, I'm not talking a CAPCHA or whatever, Im talking something something better, more like a firewall at the point of entry.

Think of an easy, resource-light way of blocking entire countries, like Russia, Nigeria etc for a start, basically any of those AH parts of the world that have proven to be thieves, scammers and resource caners in my twenty one years experience in trading online.

I know some of these Nigerian thieves etc use Proxy servers Im not expecting to catch the ones who utilise that altho maybe there are some more skilled people than my dumbass programming self that know how to block those as well.

Access Blocker, I wrote it, I use it.

If a dedicated server, why don't you use the firewall instead of .htaccess to block entire countries?

Perfect folks, I really appreciate the suggestions.

As you understand, these are real problems that we all face with these shops and I hope this bit of info on here can also help others to fight this constant battle. Fuerte ????

if you use Google Shopping you will not be allowed to block anything. My account was recently suspended because I was blocking a lot of countries that we do not ship to. I had to unblock everything for them to reinstate my account. Pretty annoying since we only use Google Shopping to target the US and Canada markets.

lankeeyankee:

if you use Google Shopping you will not be allowed to block anything. My account was recently suspended because I was blocking a lot of countries that we do not ship to. I had to unblock everything for them to reinstate my account. Pretty annoying since we only use Google Shopping to target the US and Canada markets.
I'm seeing lots of merchants getting hit with this. Even though their ads have nothing to do with the blocked countries or countries they don't ship to. Google overstepping their bounds ... again.

I do not sell outside the continental United States so we block access to everyone else!

use .htaccess
as well as Blocking provided by our host