New user registration temporarily disabled.

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We've temporarily removed the ability for new users to join Toutless. By temporarily, we mean potentially months, not hours. This is not a technical issue but a decision made to protect our community.

The rest of this post explains why. If you do not care you can click here for information on the one scenario where we will accept new users.

We have seen a rise in what can only be described as professional attempts to defraud users of this board.

In the past, the scammers who targeted our users were rare enough, working alone and had poor technical knowledge. We could generally keep them at bay until they were eventually dealt with by Irish law enforcement.

This current crop of scammers does not fit that profile. We are aware of what appears to be a team, if not multiple teams, targeting users. They have professional setups of VPNs, fraudulent documents, local knowledge, disposable banking details, disposable SIM cards, and the like. They have IP addresses that make them appear to be based in the UK and Ireland, but we've seen slip-ups that place them in Eastern Europe and Africa. It is very likely that they will not be quickly brought to justice by law enforcement without a large, coordinated international effort.

We've attempted to combat this new situation with a combination of user education, partnering with Trustap to provide an escrow service, and various technical approaches to identifying the fraudulent users.

However with the level of resources they can throw at us this is becoming a losing battle and the casualties are our users who are defrauded and our admins who are spending hours a day investigating claims and leads.

Toutless is not a site that is afraid to back away from difficult decisions when required to protect our community. It is our willingness to do go to these lengths and the assistance of our great team of volunteers who believe in the site that has allowed us to operate free of charge since 2008.

Disabling registration is a difficult decision that we are not happy to make. It impacts legitimate new users as well as the potential supply of legitimate tickets and buyers to established users. It is in all our interests to reactivate it, but we need time to research approaches that will dissuade the current crop of scammers and protect our users. This research is best done without the influx of new fraudulent accounts consuming our limited time resources.

Please be aware just because we've shut new registrations DOES NOT invalidate any of our previous advice on safely using the site. Most likely there are accounts established before this shutdown by these teams we've yet to root out. We've also seen older accounts with credentials shared with other sites that were hacked by these teams.

We strongly recommend you spend the relatively small charge to use Trustap to protect your tickets and money if you're unable to meet in person.

We've also seen evidence that this escalation is not just against us. Many popular social media and trading platforms have anecdotally seen similar increases in ticket based fraud. Please take similar precautions with any platform that does not guarantee your tickets.

Until we develop an effective vetting process for new users, we will only allow new accounts if an established account with evidence of successful past deals vouches for you. Please have the member vouching for you email us at info@toutless.com to begin that process.

There is currently no exception to this rule, no matter what reason or proof of validity you contact us with.

Thank you for your understanding.

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Currently, we will only allow new users if an established account, with evidence of successful past deals, vouches for them.

Please have the member vouching for you email us at info@toutless.com to begin that process, and we will provide them with a form link to fill out.

There are currently NO exceptions to this rule, no matter what reason or proof of validity you contact us with.