by Anne Holland, President

I received this note from a reader who asked not to be identified because she's tired of scammers hitting her promo sites.

"Dear Anne,

My promotional Web forms have been besieged by scammers trying to qualify for samples, which they then bring to Wal-Mart for store credits, or sell on eBay. Our data shows how they submit multiple variations to 'game' our promotion qualification form.

We have programmed a lot of flags into our online forms, but still these scammers keep trying to get through. We now have to manually check all form entries in addition to the scam ID programming we have done.

I believe there is a business opportunity for all of us online marketers to pool our scammer data into one single file, so that all of us can check our entries against it and disqualify people BEFORE we send them an expensive sample."

If you are interested in creating such a database, or cooperating in any other clever way to stop offer-scammers online, please contact me and I'll pass the word onto the marketer who wrote me this letter so you can get in touch.

Just write to aholland@marketingsherpa.com.