Please delete this user! post by mom

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My son just joined this forum as I thought he was getting older and it would be a great way to reach out to others who have faced / grown up with Aspergers or are currently doing so. He got a private message from the user breezon that reads

I can't even flipping copy paste this for help. There is something really wrong with all of this!! !

I am offended that there are people who may be targetting this forum because they see easy targets and in some cases, that may be true. I am upset that there is no "report" option to your private messages nor can I find any way to contact an admin other than this inept and time consuming way to report the private message.

I had noticed in another post that apparently this is happening at another autism forum and that again, upsets me greatly. I have been a member of a golden retriever forum for a couple of years and I've never rec'd a PM like this one trying to take advantage of me. My son is here less than 24 hours and he gets one. If this is a problem here because of super ignorant individuals who see the autistic population as easy targets then there should be some way to report these messages right away rather than through a time consuming thread. My son and every new member should get a PM from the admins warning of emails like this because unfortunately, someone might fall for scams like this and users should be aware of what to look for and what they should do should they recieve a private message like this. Maybe there is a quick report option but if I can't find it, obviously it's not obvious enough.

I know we're new here but I think this is an important thing to know about and have viable ways to deal with this problem.

I'm assuming, since you didn't post the message itself, that you received a nigerian scam message. First of all, there is a moderator forum specifically designed to get their attention to deal with issues like this. If you didn't post there, then it's your fault that your issue isn't being addressed. Secondly, scams like this are hardly "targeted" - they send out millions of messages a day, across any medium that they can. I'm willing to bet if you check your spam folder, you'd find hundreds of them. It's nobody's job to make the Internet "safe" for you, or anyone else. Part of being on the Internet is recognizing that there are people that will say things that offend you. You can either ignore it, or log off.

There are lot of spam bots that register here to send out those scam messages to users here. Mods ban them all the time when users keep reporting them to them. Some of us have suggested to alex (the site owner) that he should add the PM privilege to users who have made a certain number of posts so that way it will prevent spam bots sending out PMs. I don't know if anyone has ever emailed him about it or sent him a PM about it but it's been said here out in the open where he can read it.


Just teach your son to never respond to messages that say they have been looking for him and they liked his profile and to email him. Those type of posts are usually a scam and are not even real people. Also if they have zero posts, that is a clue they are a scammer.

Post reports of spam PMs here: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt158661.html
General information on dealing with spam: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt141259.html
Regrettably, spambots are a fact of Internet life and their results are best ignored - or here, reported.
Otherwise, what sliqua-jcooter and League_Girl said.

Actually League_Girl, that's a really good idea, restricting PM privileges to users making more than a certain number of posts. That's likely to kill off most of these things, I would think.

if you could let us know the nature of the message we may need to ban that user called breezon. but without any details of what the message said, it's tough to take action. can you give a synopsis?

EDIT: problem was solved and user Breezon banned, as noted in the moderator attention thread.