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Getting Illegal Spammers and Hackers Kicked
Off the Internet
Finding a Spammer's ISP
In order to complain to a spammer's ISP, you first have
to find the spammer's true ISP in the email header of the spam.
This process is complicated because:
1. Spammers almost always use a free email account as
their reply address e.g. givememoney@hotmail.com. While complaining
to the free ISP will kill the Hotmail account (a good thing), it still
doesn't get the spammer off the Internet as they still have an ISP
that gives them Internet access.
2. They will try to conceal their ISP by falsifying
it in the email header e.g. givememoney@hotmail.com actually is a
fictitious email address.
3. They find unsuspecting servers to relay their email,
which gives the appearance that the relaying server is the originating
ISP.
4. Their ISP's are in foreign countries that may or
may not take action against the spammer.
If you're interested in the process of reading email
headers, you can find some links at the end
of this article. Thankfully, there is an easy way to determine
the ISP of a spammer.
The Easy Way to Track Down a Spammer's ISP
The fastest way I've found to complain to a spammer's
ISP is to use the services of a website called SpamCop.net.
To use SpamCop.net you do the following:
1. You register for a free account
2. They send you an address to forward your spam
to.
3. You forward any email spam you want to track
to the SpamCop address (I suggest you also forward (cc:) the spam
to Spam@UCE.GOV so the spam gets included
in the law enforcement database).
4. Spamcop processes the spam and notifies you
by email.
5. You click on a link in the email that takes
you to a web page with the processed spam.
6. You review the web page to see if the spam
processed.
7. You hit the send button to mail SpamCop's
automated complaints directly to the spammer's ISP, email provider,
relay server etc.
After you have set up your account the process only
takes a couple of minutes per email. The only bad part of this process
is that you don't receive confirmation that any action has been taken.
However, rest assured that all US ISP's and many foreign ISP's do
take action on these notices and will kill the spammer's accounts
if they can identify the spammer.
Be advised that while SpamCop is free, they do request
small donations.
I think that SpamCop is a good utility that does a decent
job of tracking down a spammer's ISP. It is a tremendous time saver
as it can take 30 minutes or more to manually investigate an email
header.
For those of you that like to track down spammers on
their own, study information on decoding eamil headers.
Next - Finding a
Hacker's ISP >>
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