Hi

Lately I have got some notifications about new VAT submitted (new customer), but when I look at name and email address it looks very Suspicious as they are meaningless names and the emailadress are also strange and all from gmail.com.
There are no addresses added or other "real" information.

Should I delete these new "customers" and is this a potential security risc for my site?

TCH wrote:

Do they all have the same IP address?

If you use nopCommerce 2.x you can change how customers register to prevent spammers and bots (you might be able to do this in 1.x versions but I'm not familiar with 1.x).

If you're concerned these might be real people you could just e-mail them and try to communicate about their new accounts.

If the accounts are just normal registered users then there is probably not a security risk, but a bunch of fake users would be annoying. If the accounts were created as administrators, moderators, or anything more than registered user then that is concerning. They might also use those accounts to spam your product reviews, news, and forums.

I've had a lot of these.  Unless they look at least somewhat legitimate I delete them.  If you have any text box submissions in your store some of these posters are putting urls into the posts to get some additional seo weight.  I think they are depending on a lot of the bots that collect info and don't honor the robot.txt file spreading their garbage links around.

Also as Skyler mentioned check the ip addresses.  You may want to block the ranges for some of those that are persistently posting.