Time flies.

It’s hard to believe it’s been six years since we paid our 10 bucks and bought the ScamSurvivors name for that first year to create this site.  Since then, so much has happened.  I thought I’d share some of the funnier or more unique stories from that time in this blob post, in no particular order.

In one of the earliest incidents, we were kicked off our shared host after our site was the victim of a DDoS attack so big it took down our site, the entire node we were on, and several hundred other sites who had the misfortune to be on the same node.  Luckily they gave us 24 hours to make a backup and move elsewhere.  Ever since, we’ve been on our own server with DDoS protection.  We still get attacked, but thankfully we’ve not been down due to one since.

We were however down for 3 weeks a few years ago after we moved to a new host and were given a server with a dodgy hard drive.  There was lots of hair being pulled out, but thankfully we managed to find another host and Frankenstein together the site from various backups.  Thankfully we’ve had no issues since then.

Around 3 months into our existence, we were threatened with a takedown request after the webmaster of a site decided to take offence at our posting images of the model his site worked with, despite our contacting him looking to work with him in raising awareness of scammers abusing stolen images of his client.  I won’t name names, but when I did some research it turned out that www.josieannmiller.com was available to buy, so I did and had it redirect to our site.  A few weeks later, the webmaster actually joined our forum and let us know that the scammer problem had become so bad that he’d put a scam warning on his site and a link to us in it.

Another time we had a threatening email from a company because an email from a scammer pretending to be them was posted on our forum.  They demanded we remove all mention of them, which I respectfully did.  I also posted up their emails to us in order to explain why we’d made such a move.  The odd thing is, that meant the three mentions of their name made by the scammer were replaced with almost 50 mentions of their name from their emails.  How did this one end?  With an apology from them and a “keep up the good work” message.

Most recently, a major company came to us looking to work with us in dealing with the scammers abusing their service.  I can’t name names, but suffice to say it’s a BIG name!

The past sis years have been – interesting to say the least.  Would I do it all again?  Most definitely.  Would I do it any differently?  Probably not.  Where would be the fun in that?