The Internet has opened up wonderful opportunities for bringing people in contact with each other, using social networking sites, forums, dating sites, chat rooms, instant messaging, blogs and so on. Webmasters and start-up companies from around the world are setting up new such sites every day, inviting people to join and start interacting with each other. Unfortunately, not all users out there are innocently trying to interact with new and existing friends. Due to the ease at which user profiles can be created, and because of limited means of checking user's real-life credentials, criminal elements are now exploiting these new areas. They establish fake user profiles, often called "scam profiles", in order to conduct one of several types of fraud. The two most common are:

Advanced Fee fraud ("Nigerian 419 scam"), where the scammer will ask for advance payment in promise for great financial returns, often in order to initialise a money transfer procedure;

"Romance scam", where a dating site is used to establish an online relationship, before the scammer asks for money for travel costs or any other personal expense.

Webmasters will normally be alerted to these scam profiles which have been established on their websites, but often after the damage has been done. Not only does this result in a financial loss for the victim, but in the long term such incidents will damage the reputation of the website as well. Some free websites are known to have anywhere between 10% to 30% fraudulent profiles, and after a short time this will often lead to the demise of the whole business.

Anatoa is a collaborative attempt to solve this problem. Our service allows new profiles to be checked against our proprietary fraud detection system which is powered by feedback from all our participating sites. If a scammer has tried his tricks on one of "our" websites, we will know who he is and put many measures in the way of his continued activity on other websites which use our service.

If you are a webmaster who has established your own member based site, chances are you have used a free or commercial script as a starting point. We provide plug-in solutions for the most popular of these scripts, as well as an API for custom developed sites.

Our service is completely free for small sites. You only need to pay for a subscription once you reach a certain number of new members every month, which is when your site has reached an earning potential and you need to make sure its quality is maintained to keep growing.