I have just created a website about internet fraud. I get at least 10 emails a day from nigerian scam letters, lottery fraud, paypal and ebay scam letters. I report them all to law enforcement, but it is really getting on my nerves. What I have started doing is posting all there emails on my website pointing out how they are a scam. I am worried about retaliation from the scammers, nothing has happened yet but I am planning ahead I am worried they will send spam out with my email to try to get my site shut down or? Does anyone have any idea what is the best way to prevent this from happening? Any ideas appreciated. Thanks
While they probably could claim that you are breaking copywrite, I doubt they would do anything about it, since they're in the wrong for spamming you anyway. Whats the site? I always enjoy a good read from a wealthy nigerian
Thanks for your advice. I wish I knew more about dos attacks or security on my server, I want to learn as much as I can. For my hosting I have my own DNS and a web host manager where I can create an unlimited amount of websites with it. But I don't really know anything about security unfortunately Here is my domain if you want to look at some nigerian scams: http://rooky.info Keep in mind I just started the site so I know it needs alot of improvement. I think instead of listing links like Scam #1, Scam #2 etc...I need to write descriptions of each email so that it is easier for search engines to find. Thank again...
Thank you One way to look at it is that I will always have alot of original free content for my site sent right to my email. I think once I make some improvements my site will definately get good traffic. But I worry when it starts getting more traffic then the email scammers are going to get upset and try to sabotage my site. Motivates me to learn more about security...
Rebecca, I really admire what you are doing. It is something I feel in my heart is the right thing to do but I just do not have the resources to protect myself from all the back-slashes that would come. If you do not know much about server security, you might want to get some experts to look through your server with a fine toothcomb to make sure that everything is secured. Also it may be a good thing to arm your server with a hardware firewall because believe you me, you would expect a lot of them who wants to try to infiltrate your server. A software firewall is great but if there is a lot of rules to implement and a lot of bad incoming traffic, it may overwhelm your server so a hardware firewall would take most of the heat. It is also good to hook your server up at a datacenter which has a quickstep plan to overcome DDoS attacks on a regular basis. It may not be a bad idea to set up several mirror servers at separate location so that if one is being attacked, you can switch over to the next server somewhere else. I don't believe there is a foolproof way of stopping or preventing attacks, all you can do is to be proactive to fight fire on a daily or hourly basis. All the best in what you are doing for standing up for us, scary cats. Power to you!
I don't think you need to worry too much. I used to be involved with a site that is probably one of the biggest communites that deal with this sort of thing - they have in excess of 10K members. The site has only ever been dDos'd a couple of times - and that was after being online for over 2 years. Most scam is a numbers game - much like Spam. By taking sensible precautions, you should not have any problems at all.
Rebecca, You might have to worry about supplemental results if your whole site is mainly scam letters as other sites may have posted the same letters.If so those pages will never rank well and it will harm your whole site. If you post several letters on each page then that might not be a problem, or you could add a large UNIQUE intro paragraph to each scam letter page to offset the duplication.
If it's just Nigerian scammers, you don't have anything to worry about. Those guys are almost as dumb as the people who send them money.
Good ideasI feel better now. You guys have been so helpful! I don't know alot about security so at this point I got someone else that is going to handle that.(At least with Eddys comments I knew what I should request or ask about). LoriVa thanks for your advice as well...I thought about it and I think I will put an intro on each letter. Raisin, that is funny I think the nigerian scammers are dumb for what they do. But if you think about these elaborate stories they make up, if they only took some of that energy and put it towards something good...
My main fear are those phishing sites. They must probably be created by people who knows what they are doing.
In their minds they are doing good things. They feel like they are striking a blow at the western world that has been screwing them over. I'd have more sympathy for people if these scams were somewhat believable. But really why would some dictator send you an email via yahoo mail offering you millions of dollars? What were these people planning to tell the IRS when 80 million suddenly shows up in their account from a offshore bank? It sorta reminds me of that winner of survivor who didn't pay his taxes. Some people just don't think about things.
lol dont waste your time, the scammers all use fake names and all work in countries where the government allows this kind of thing to happen, their is internet cafe's filled with little critters doing internet fraud 24/7 with guards and police baring the doors. your chanes of catching them are 0-10000000000 posting their emails is also stupid as every new scam they send a new email address is set up lol..
change password from now and then use more then 10 char (L and N) for a password , you are doing a great job for helping people that are not that smart to look at the links that them stupid scamers send , keep on going thank you Tv
I agree. A few years ago my sister got an email from someone pretending they were with Paypal saying she has to update her info. She did and didn't think much about it. Then found out someone was using her Paypal account in Australia! I think new people to ebay and paypal are especially vulnerable. I don't click on links in any emails I get anymore A couple of weeks ago, I reported a fraud email to Paypal...then a few hours later I get another email as if it was responding to my reporting the last one. It turns out the second email was also a fraud as well. CRAZY I just got an email today pretending Ebay is awarding me with power seller AND power buyer status. It is at: http://www.rooky.info/ebay-1.html
About paypal phishing emails: Look at the url that the link leads to in your statusbar. Read it completely. It must begin with https://www.paypal.com & not contain a dot after the com. & most importantly check mail headers! If something is sent from mail.yahoo.com then it obviously isn't from paypal. Avoid clicking on links at all, just open up a browser window, go to paypal.com & log in.
Tighten up server security... Most scammers are not that great with *nix security anyway, but stay safe.
Hi All - I have experienced a 'threat for cash' on one my Web sites and server hosting accounts back 2001 from some knuckle head calling himself 'Dr. Bee' using some poor smoe's email addy out of South Africa, of all places. At the time I was hosted on a server with 160 other sites, the fella sent an email asking if the site was going 'offline' for maintance - we replied that maintance was not scheduled and operations would continue as normal with no interruptions. Quick as a bat, a reply came in stating that if a Western Union wire transfer was not made for the amount of $5000.00 (USD), then the web site would be taken offline. Being an a typical Aussie male, I replied Austalian style with a series of short sentences that basically translated to: "Go swim in Darwin harbour with a cows hind leg attached to your back, ya drungo." Shortly after that I experienced my first concerted DDos attack, which not only knocked the site for six, it also knocked everyone else and the server straight out of the paddock. Needless to say, the ISP at the time did not hesitate to terminate the agreement it had in place, even though it was no fault of the web site itself. So, I went on my first ever 'web-vision quest', pissed-off at the world, and more particualrly the dimwit who Dos the site... Dr. Bee I found the tools and information presented for 'free' by Steve Gibson, Gibson Research Corporation to be of immense value - got sai again - great tools!!! http://www.grc.com/default.htm GRC's own DDoS attack story http://www.grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm Distributed Denial of Service Attacks(DDoS) Resources CERT is an organization devoted to ensuring that appropriate technology and systems management practices are used to resist attacks on networked systems - http://www.cert.org/ To be honest, I never did find Dr. Bee - but neverless I learned a lot of good things and in the process "tagged and bagged" some Dr. Bee wannabes that came along after I edumacated myself a little and put in some dingo fences (procedures and system). I think what you are doing is brilliant, in Australia it is termed "BOTL" - balls on the line. There used to be a site called MLM Cop that listed all the dodgy ponzi (hyip) scammers, digital currency scammers (paypal, e-gold - etc), but the last time I checked I think it had gone.