I just found an account on one of my servers to be spending mass amounts of obvious spam. We double checked everything and suspended the account. My question is what should I do next?

- Do I report him to his ISP(s)? (I have two IP's, one at comcast, the other at AT&T)
- Is there any government organization that is interested or cares? (We are located in the US)
- Is there anything else I should do?

Thanks for any help and advice. :)

Originally posted by Dersursine
- Do I report him to his ISP(s)? (I have two IP's, one at comcast, the other at AT&T)


Unless he is sending spam directly from his ISP's network (and he's probably not, because that would be dumb), his ISP can't do a thing about it.

Originally posted by Dersursine
- Is there any government organization that is interested or cares? (We are located in the US)


One that cares? No. There's so much spam out there that reporting a specific small case won't make a difference.

Originally posted by Dersursine
- Is there anything else I should do?


Close his account, perhaps issue a refund, and be watchful for future spammers.

Thanks for the reply, altho it isn't really what I was hoping for. Anyways, my comments are below.

Originally posted by bqinternet
Unless he is sending spam directly from his ISP's network (and he's probably not, because that would be dumb), his ISP can't do a thing about it.

Hard to call... But all the spam came from one of two IP addresses. And at the very least I would think the ISP would want to block the IP's from sending spam and notify the people to have their computer checked.

Originally posted by bqinternet
One that cares? No. There's so much spam out there that reporting a specific small case won't make a difference.

I see what your saying, but we can't stop spam by ignoring all the little guys. At some point, someone has to go after anyone who does it...

Originally posted by bqinternet
Close his account, perhaps issue a refund, and be watchful for future spammers.

The account is suspended for a week, durring which time he can contest its suspension. Then, assuming the account is closed he will NOT be getting a refund since he A) broke our ToS/AUP, and B) Broke the law.

Originally posted by Dersursine
Do I report him to his ISP(s)? (I have two IP's, one at comcast, the other at AT&T)

You can try, but Comcast won't do anything. Dunno about AT$T.

- Is there any government organization that is interested or cares? (We are located in the US)

No to both.


- Is there anything else I should do?

Give your provider a heads-up on the situation - let them know what has happened and what you've done to correct it.

Regards,
-B

Originally posted by TMX
Give your provider a heads-up on the situation - let them know what has happened and what you've done to correct it.

Didn't think of that one, good thinking though. Thanks for the idea.

Originally posted by bqinternet
Unless he is sending spam directly from his ISP's network (and he's probably not, because that would be dumb), his ISP can't do a thing about it.

Most ISP's have a clause about not using their service for illegal purposes. In that respect, they would have a good reason to turn off his account. However, as others have stated, some ISP's won't do anything about it if it doesn't affect their bottom line.

Reporting him isn't going to do anything and might just get your server blacklisted.

Make sure you check the major spam lists to make sure your server is not on them and also contact your upstream and let them know what happened and how you dealt with it.

Good luck!

--Tina

The account is suspended for a week, durring which time he can contest its suspension. Then, assuming the account is closed he will NOT be getting a refund since he A) broke our ToS/AUP, and B) Broke the law.
Neither of which will stop them getting a chargeback against you, and many spammer use stolen card details anyhow.

Shut down, block them from ordering again, refund and move on - it's the only way to stay sane ..

I have not had to deal with many problems with spam but I remember that someone I know received a warning from Comcast due to spam - but that was a few years ago. More recently I reported a spammer to Comcast. It took two emails and I never received a reply but the spam did stop.

So in some circumstances it may pay to report them to their ISP.

Originally posted by Dersursine
I just found an account on one of my servers to be spending mass amounts of obvious spam. We double checked everything and suspended the account. My question is what should I do next?

Public execution? J/k

Generally speaking, reporting spammers to their ISP is a waste of time. In our case, if there are a large number of mailing from a particular spammer, we try and figure out what/who they are advertising. We just re-direct (via a filter rule) to have any incoming spam redirected back to the advertiser- or their affiliates until it gets stopped.

We tried this once with Trendwest Vacations/Marriott and they begged us to turn our filter off, as it was severely interrupting their operations. We told them that they would stop getting the spam as soon as they stopped spamming us. Their affiliate was sending out hundreds of mailing of crap advertising a 3 day / 2 night vacation in Orlando Florida through some travel agency underwritten by Marriott. Needless to say, the mailings stopped after thousands of spams were re-directed back to the affiliates being advertised.

I think more providers need to do stuff like this to send a clear message to the product/service providers that emailing promotions do not pay, as the spammers themselves don't care anyway. =)

You must be kidding me - give refunds to spammers ? I will charge them for extra $500 and if he ever start complain - I will forward copy of his actions to State Attorney General - this will cost him $5,000 per each spammable email.

Only if we be agressive against spammers they will stop create problems for us.

Regards

Steve


>Close his account, perhaps issue a refund, and be watchful for >future spammers. [/B][/QUOTE]

Even if I could just randomly charge the account an extra 500$, I wouldn't do that since its probably a stolen CC#. But informing the Attorney General could prove useful if they ever manage to track down the real person doing the spamming.

I agree, the spammer probably signed up using a stolen CC. What you should do is verify your accounts before activating them, that way you will have their real phone number and with a real phone number you can always trace them down.

A spammer or fraud user would never provide you with a real phone number and/or address. This way you will not be setting up spammers or hackers on your servers :)

Originally posted by WN-Ali
A spammer or fraud user would never provide you with a real phone number and/or address. This way you will not be setting up spammers or hackers on your servers :)

On Authorize.net (i dont know about others), you can harden your gateway to only process orders where the address and other things must match. - which is a good thing ;)