This is a quick note to all the hosting providers and resellers. Check the IP address associated with each order you receive. If the "customer" is in San Diego, USA, but the IP address is in Jakarta, Indonesia, you really do need to think twice about accepting the account. We have found that using a program from McAfee called Visual Trace has helped cut out a great deal of fraudulent orders.

I believe that the software is licensed by McAfee from NeoWorx. It really is a nice piece of software that I have found well worth the $20 price tag. You can also find the owner of an IP block by looking it up in ARIN and APNIC, or using a piece of software like Whois Web.

I do not know about the experiences of other companies, but we have started receiving a fairly significant number of fraudulent orders over the last year and anything that can reduse fraud and help report stolen credit card numbers is a good thing.

Best regards,
Frank Rietta

I was thinking about this very issue today.

Is anyone aware of a script, perl preferably that can take an IP and create a JPG/GIF/PNG of the visual traceroute from your current machine, this would be awesome in addition to your signup script, get the IP of the customer placing the order, visually route it, attach temp.gif to the email and when you get the order you have it right there look at the address on the order, look at the picture, if it don't match up, then find out why.

When I have a chance I'll look around for a perl script to implement into my signup scripts, if someone already knows of something like this then save me the searching and post a URL! :D

Now that would be the ultimate lazy way of getting the job done ;-) Also very elegant and efficient.

Now things get really fun when scripts are made that can identify spam senders and other intruders by behavior and automatically firewall their IP address and at times IP net blocks to prevent further damage.

Best regards,
Frank Rietta

NeoWorx or whatever also has a free edition on their website which is what I use. NeoTrace express, it's very nice. Shows a graphic trace over the map, looks up domain/ip owner info and shows the traceroute. :-)

Actually, from what I remember, they pulled the free version from the web site. It is still there:

http://www.neoworx.com/download
http://www.neoworx.com/download/NTX325.exe

-but I don't exactly know why they don't link to it, nor if it actually works, since you needed a registration number to use it (which was free, you just had to register on their site).

Hello
Just go to www.samspade.org and download the windows version for free.
Although having worked in this game for a while I can spot an APNIC IP address at 100m.

Gordon