Avoiding Spam, Scam, and Fraudulent Activities
To continue to offer the best possible service one of The Restaurant Zone’s top priorities is to eliminate spam, scam and fraudulent activity from our website. We have in place many different tools to reduce these adverse activities and maintain quality listings on our site.
1. By creating a member-only based service we can control who can post and who can continue to use our website.
2. We use software to prevent spam robots from gaining access to our site and posting.
3. We continuously monitor our site to ensure quality control.
4. We regularly check our email inbox for problems/issues reported by our members.
Even with all of these safeguards in place, it is hard to completely guarantee that you won’t encounter any unfavorable activity; which is why we decided to write a blog on this topic to educate our users as an additional precaution. Here is how our members can better protect themselves against spam, scam and fraud:
- Look out for listings that have many typos, missing contact information, no pictures, and unusually low or high listing prices. Postings that use all or many of these should raise red flags.
- We recommend that you call the seller of a listing, and advise people to take a look at the listed product in person. Deal locally with people! Checking out the product in person allows the buyer to get a better idea of the quality of the product and allows for a more trustworthy transaction.
- Beware of listings that require online transactions, wiring, or fake cashier checks. I would advise against this, again deal locally and in person!
- Keep in mind The Restaurant Zone is NOT involved in any transactions.
- Watch out for email scams like the Nigerian Fraud, or someone emailing you from outside the country requesting personal information and wanting to make a sale or online transaction (this is a popular email scam).
- Avoid giving out financial information, social security, credit card, bank account, personal information, or background and credit checks.
- Avoid deals involving shipping or escrow services.
- Look for trusted sellers, if it is a small local seller deal with him/her in person. For larger sellers (like manufacturer/wholesalers) with websites, verify the company and do a little research & call before making any purchases.
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