[H-GEN] Theres Still Hope!

[Joe Skilton]

Hi Everyone,
    Probably a little off topic for a linux mailing list, but it involves all of us(i'd imagine anyway) so I will continue:

Recently a Customer of mine recieved a spam email in his Hotmail Inbox(generic "We have 4 Mill for you here, but we need your bank account details first" spam) and unfortunatly for him he believed it.  I first noticed this activity while scanning a document for him that contained his bank a/c details, I probably shouldn't have been nosy, but when I saw the scan I just had to investigate.  Straight away I knew it was bogus(even without believing the damning evidence on their email they had sent) when I went to their supposed homepage at www.accountant.com.

The domain itself was owned by a company that didnt seem to exist, convieniently the last six or seven routers closest to the domain werent responding to echo requests, the IP address could not be reverse DNS'ed and the mailserver at accountant.com didnt seem to exist, but their mx Records were intact, and after two emails to this company I recieved this reply: 

Hello
 
 Thank you for contacting the outblaze.com abuse desk.

 The account you reported is now terminated, along with 
 today's quota of sundry other Nigerian generals, bankers,
 engineers, attorneys and relatives of dead dictators.

 Outblaze is one of the largest providers of webmail services in
 the world.  As a responsible ISP, we hate spam, and we do not
 allow our network to be abused by spammers.

 There is only one thing that we hate more than spammers - 419
 (nigerian) scam artists abusing our systems.  

<Snip insignificant links to more info on the scam>

And after sending an email to the Scammers and happily recieving a bounce reply a few seconds later I am happy to report that my jobs done, We saved our customers neck without invading his privacy (hey, I had to glance at the Paper as I put it on the scanner, not my fault I remembered the details), and my reason for posting this ?, if even a small percentage of people who use email for legit reason's went to this trouble mabye once a month to shutdown a scammer/spammer I recon my inbox would get alot cleaner :).

cheers, sorry to bore.
    Joe
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.humbug.org.au/pipermail/general/attachments/20030720/17a638b9/attachment.html>