Multiple accounts: what steps do you take?

[cpvr]

I know a lot of virtual pet sites seem to run into this problem when they're new or old, and new members just love to create multiple accounts for some odd reason, whether to get rich faster, or just abuse the game play... It's sometimes abused when there's a referral system implemented and users want to be the #1 referrer by cheating... So, what steps do you take as an owner, or staff member of a virtual pet site? How do you stop multiple accounts from being created?

It's a problem that needs to be stopped indeed! :)

[Russell]

When I open a virtual pet website I will hire someone who I can trust to look over the userdatabase very thoroughly. I will have them look for very similar usernames (ex: surfboy192 and surfboy191) and who has the same IPs. I will then instruct who ever is in charge to PM them confronting them about the situation. If this doesn't get a truthful answer out then I will suspend one of the accounts and possibly delete if necessary.

[Ole]

I programmed something that will match a users IP when someone wants to investigate a user. It'll list all the accounts that that IP is registered to.

[GodsGal]

But what if two different people have accounts on the same IP? I know it's that way in my house.

[cpvr]

But what if two different people have accounts on the same IP? I know it's that way in my house.
Then, it's not a multiple account. It's family.

[stuffradio]

just check for same IP addresses, if it's same don't allow to register. If someone from family is playing on same IP then just don't allow transfers between accounts from same IP.

[Ole]

Yah, but also things like email and names and other similarities can be seen in accounts to know when someone is using multiple accounts.

[Seto Kaiba]

Yah, but also things like email and names and other similarities can be seen in accounts to know when someone is using multiple accounts.

Some people are more clever than that though :P I have two totally unrelated accounts name-wise and email-wise on Neopets.

[Dazitov]

Some people are more clever than that though :P I have two totally unrelated accounts name-wise and email-wise on Neopets.

Its the clever ones that go unnoticed.

[bigdude]

The tricky ones are when a user creates accounts with different IP's, different passwords, ages, names, etc. Those are the difficult ones to track, but we have multiple methods to track down multiple account owners. You aren't obviously going to catch them all, but if you have good logging methods, you should be able to find many multiple accounts easily.

[Fly]

Well, I'm not very clever. When I created a Neopets account for Ami and Shannon (my kids), plus had my accounts, I got frozen. They sent me a reason...I had too many accounts on 1 address. Even tho in all profiles it stated that there were multiple users for the IP. I thought that stunk to high heaven. ~blah~

So now I just stick to my accounts, which is easy since the kids are gone.

[chickapets.com]

The first step we use at chickapets is our IP matching script. Then its a matter of investigating the accounts further. We have many tools on chickapets to find out if 1 user has multiple accounts or if its just family members.

I wont list the ways here, don't want to give the users a heads up on how to avoid detection.

[MyLilLisa]

saddly, at least when it comes to neopets, they seem to often freeze people who didn't do anything wrong. ;P