Is Reporting Internet Fraud to a Provider Effective?

[Loren Booda]

Does it do any good to contact the webmaster (or another position - security?) of a provider (like Yahoo) to report incidences of fraud ("I have $2.5 million for you") using their network to communicate?

 

[scott1]

Have you tried?

If that doesn't work you could report it to the FTC(or whatever investigates that)

 

[rhuthwaite]

I would say do it! I hate frauds they need to learn that they can't steel others work.

 

[Rach3]

It's hopeless. There are many thousands of these frauds and swindlers, they are small and agile, while the agencies are overworked bureaucracies. There was a thread here about a fraud selling "cancer cures" to victims:

https://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-105086.html

Eventually the FDA shut down their commercial operations (perhaps only because they appeared on FOX news). They still have their web domain:

The Cancer Control websites are closed and no more products that cure cancer are being sold. That's good news for the thousands of competing websites that also claim to sell cancer cures or company’s profiting from donations. Actually, it is not so good news for the millions of cancer patients in America. Was Cancer Control really curing cancer or fake?? We investigated and found out what was fake and what was not. The cancer cure website was shut down by the government on January 11, 2006. Not because the product was fake, but because it was not paying the FDA the required millions...

http://cancercure.org/

It seems then, these crooks did not get the legnthy prison sentences they deserved.

 

[Rach3]

Just to put the problem in perspective:

Results 1 - 10 of about 3,010,000 for nigeria scam
Results 1 - 10 of about 2,660,000 for magnet therapy
Results 1 - 10 of about 11,100,000 for "free energy"
Results 1 - 10 of about 6,220,000 for miracle cures
Results 1 - 10 of about 13,200,000 for detox
Results 1 - 10 of about 5,370,000 for AIDS conspiracy
Results 1 - 10 of about 3,520,000 for herbal therapy cancer
Results 1 - 10 of about 71,300,000 for intelligent design
Results 1 - 10 of about 5,960,000 for cold fusion energy
Results 1 - 10 of about 7,410,000 for ancient cure
Results 1 - 10 of about 235,000,000 for enlarge

http://www.google.com/

 

[Rach3]

For comparison:

Results 1 - 10 of about 2,660,000 for magnet therapy
Results 1 - 10 of about 2,560,000 for trans unsaturated

 

[Loren Booda]

And I thought the spam appeared because I was so popular.

Rach3 on!

 

[Astronuc]

Let's not forget "on-line diplomas"

Lawyer: Gov't workers got fake diplomas
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061012/ap_on_go_ot/diploma_mill (link may have time-limited viability)

SPOKANE, Wash. - At least 135 federal employees, including a White House staff member and National Security Agency employees, bought bogus online college degrees from a diploma mill, a lawyer in the case against the mill operators said.

Some of those who paid thousands of dollars for phony diplomas include a senior State Department employee in Kuwait and a Department of Justice employee in Spokane, defense lawyer Peter S. Schweda said Wednesday.

The bogus degree purchases by the federal workers were revealed Wednesday during a U.S. District Court status conference for five defendants in the case against the mill, The Spokesman-Review reported Thursday.

None of the federal officials was identified during the conference.

"We're not going to disclose who bought these degrees until after the trial is under way," U.S. Attorney James A. McDevitt told the newspaper.

The alleged ringleaders of the bogus diploma mill, Dixie E. and Stephen K. Randock Sr., were indicted in October 2005 on charges of conspiring to commit wire and mail fraud and laundering almost $2 million in diploma mill receipts from 2002 to 2005. The indictments were the result of an eight-month investigation into the mill.

 

[Moonbear]

If I'm using a web email service, I usually use the "report junk mail" or "report spam" or whatever it's called by each service when I delete those types of emails. I don't know how far they investigate those reports, or if they just add them to their filter, but that's an easy start.

If you get ones spoofing another provider as part of a phishing scam, such as the ones pretending to be a credit card company or eBay, reporting it directly to the fraud department of the company they are spoofing gets better results than going to the email provider (they'll ask you to copy complete header information...a lot of times the email address you see isn't really the origin of the spam anyway, but is also spoofed).

 

[TeTeC]

Gmail also has an option to signal phishing.

 

[rootX]

I got some emails from @purdue.edu so I forwarded those to their webmaster but never got any reply.