How do you deal with spammers?

[FakeTextTGP]

When you offer epass etc type payments you open the door to fraud. Not trying to get you paranoid, just warning, Get ready to be sued, or start scrubbing your signups

[twintone]

You did a lot more then you really HAD to do, but that is good. Contacting the ISP's would have been a lot of work, and I respect the fact that you went through the trouble to do that.

Unfortunately most huge ISP's just don't give a rats ass anymore, nor do they have the man power to deal with your issue the way they should be.

I think everything you did is above and beyond what most would have done, and others should follow your lead.

Due to this incident, if you have lost, or had to pay for help and the total is $5000.00 US or more, and you are a legitimate business in the US. The FBI will help you, and track down this jackass. They too are so swamped that they can not deal with issues unless they have caused a loss to a business of $5000.00 or more.

We had an issue like this happen to us several years ago, and wete able to get the FBI involved in it. This was before they had the 5K policy in place. We had a guy signup and start spamming from our network, and he was terminated immediately. Within a few hours he was sending out emails spamming our service saying we will be happy to host CP, and all kinds of illegal shit. On top of that, he used our return address in all his mailings. So we received over 160,000 emails.. bounces, people bitching at us, telling us we are sick fuckers.. etc. It was bad news to say the least. I honestly think if I would have caught the guy I would have taken a hammer to each individual finger.. in other words, he would never typed again, let alone use his hands again.

In the end it was some guy from Romania. The FBI tracked him down, but Romania isn't real willing to help the US with these types of things, and said they would "take care of the person". I don't know what ever happened to the guy, but the spamming stopped, and that is what our goal was.

Good luck in your hunt for the guy. I hope he gets what he has coming.

[Greenguy]

Originally Posted by FakeTextTGP

When you offer epass etc type payments you open the door to fraud. Not trying to get you paranoid, just warning, Get ready to be sued, or start scrubbing your signups

I'm not sure why they'd be sued and I assume that you're talking about scrubbing the webmaster's that sign up, but one thing did pop into my mind: it'd be a nice feature & a good gesture on ePassporte's part to be able to verify the info that the webmasters used when signing up with the info on file with ePassporte. Not that the programs should have access to their database, but maybe an email to ePass with the info that the webmaster used & then they could just verify that the info they have is the same (or similar)

[SexycityBrian]

Originally Posted by FakeTextTGP

When you offer epass etc type payments you open the door to fraud. Not trying to get you paranoid, just warning, Get ready to be sued, or start scrubbing your signups

Not really to concerned about getting sued but the time spent dealing with the problem was a real waste of money and we still have some work to do with our hosting company and spamhaus. At least for now is seems that the spammer has quit (fingers crossed). As for the epassporte payments we are going to discuss that today and see if we can come up with a solution. I am thinking of a couple ways to do the epassporte for new affiliate signups that would hopefully give us some valid information about them.

[FakeTextTGP]

Originally Posted by SexycityBrian

Not really to concerned about getting sued but the time spent dealing with the problem was a real waste of money and we still have some work to do with our hosting company and spamhaus. At least for now is seems that the spammer has quit (fingers crossed). As for the epassporte payments we are going to discuss that today and see if we can come up with a solution. I am thinking of a couple ways to do the epassporte for new affiliate signups that would hopefully give us some valid information about them.

I'd be concerned, one of the old companies I worked for got sued, and the person mailing was not even affiliated or an affiliate of the program... I think a lot of spam is intentional to hide other real spam and they pick on some progrms in front of them... The major player sued us via John Doe terms, and well we proved to them it was not us... and they finally dropped it, but they will come after you if you have something they want... "CASH"