How I owned spammers

So, this may not be for everyone, but it worked like a charm for me.

I didn't do anything with my site/forum for a few weeks to track organic growth and to assess and research the most popular issues/topics related to my niche. Meanwhile, spammers moved in and overtook it (I had a pretty good spam filter, but I failed to pay attention to some items and spammers won, albeit briefly). One popular spammer was a Jordan shoe scam site that fronts as a legitimate business. It became extremely difficult to fight back against this spammer.

So, I did a WHOIS search on the site, saw all the fake information that the scammers gave to the registar. They owner was a woman with a made-up name and made-up address in Delaware. I checked the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names and didn't see any city, town, village, or shack with the name of the city that was in the WHOIS information. So, I then proceeded to head over to the USPS' website and check out the ZIP code. Turns out, the USPS didn't even recognize the ZIP code.

I sent the spammer and email that I found in the WHOIS information and explained that it wasn't a great business setup to spam people, let alone have a crappy-looking website, and that I requested they either respond to my email or simply stop spamming my site within 24 hours. I explained if they failed to stop spamming my site, I would take "additional measures" to interrupt their scamming and spamming activities.

As you might expect, the spamming did not cease. So, I went to ICANN's site and reported the false WHOIS information. Under ICANN rules, the registar is required to investigate. I didn't receive a response from ICANN or the registar, but some weeks later, the scammer's site was dropped by the registar and it was setup again with a Chinese registar. The scammer is still using fake contact information, albeit now in France (I checked with Google maps).

It's a nice and relatively not-too-time-consuming way to screw over the spammers/scammers that have no respect for your forum or your work.

 

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Thanks for the share

 

Seems like a lot of work to stop one spammer, but I understand that the feeling of satisfaction is much more important than stopping spam. Sometime when I'm bored, I'll do this with spam comments on my site too, thank you for the tip!