What Happens When...............

Here in the U.S., We have a Government agency called the "Federal Trade Commission" where you can forward SPAM or E-Mail received from people that you don't know or don't WANT to know. You can also forward these messages to individual ISP's to report member abuse. For years, I have been forwarding messages that say I won a zillion dollars in a lottery drawing in the Congo, inherited money from the death of someone in Africa, have to prove ownership to cargo at a shipping pier that has my name on the paperwork or even a site I can go to for cheap Canadian medications. Also there is a real threat that some of these e-mails contain a virus and if opened, could be a major headache for your system! At times, when available, I have even forwarded these messages to the individuals ISP to report abuse. Most of these sites state after the report that "You will be contacted if more information is needed to conduct an investigation" and "We maintain a database of files and reports of abuse and take necessary action when there are multiple reports against one address".
My question to you my friends, Have you ever done the same reporting to a Government agency or ISP about abuse? Have you ever been contacted AFTER filing such a report for more information? What happens when you ACTUALLY report these forms of abuse? Do these entities really investigate these reports or are the just a pacifier for us?

-Tim

 

I haven't reported spam to a Government department but have reported one or two to ISP's, though mainly I have gone through and reported at a site called SpamCop (think Cisco have some involvement or run the site), which has worked wonders as I just get more what I would call legitimate spam now (well it gets flagged as spam), in this case I get advertisements from companies who I have registered my emails with, though very rarely I get them either.

When I did get spam it wasn't really abusive, mostly got links in the email which I'll assume were medication or other various links, though sometimes I got some pictures in the body of the email of women who were quite well endowed chest wise :snckr:

Never been contacted after reporting spam, if reported correctly you will have given them enough information to look into it and see if they can do anything.

I can't guarantee this is how it happens but could make an educated guess that the network administrators running the network would look into email and look for a few things like;

Where it came from, usually via IP address as they can't hide these, they can use other computers if they got viruses on them but generally they use other mail servers they may control constantly so they will likely get blocked rather than the originating IP Address. I've had emails coming from mail servers in various places like Russia, China, Pakistan, India, Belarus, UK (when I reported to an ISP here) and other countries I can't recall right now.

What content it contained and the email address itself, and work to block it based on those three and possibly others.

 

The UK has a website offically linked to the police division dedicated to on line fraud, the odd e mail phishing attempts supposedly from banks I don't have accounts with, and even supposedly from the bank I do have an account with, have all been sent to this address,

http://www.actionfraud.org.uk/help-disrupt-fraudsters-by-reporting-scam-emails-feb11

Nev.