Cheesefood
Well-Known Member
This afternoon, I got one of those eBay Phishing e-mails. As usual, I did a "View Source" to see where this one was generated from, and was surprised to see that it was a .com address. I went to the root site, and it's just some family blog! OK, so I go back to the e-mail and click on the link and sure enough, it's to a site wanting my eBay userID and password.
So I run over to godaddy.com and do a whois. Conveniently enough, they register their name with godaddy, so I send godaddy an anti-phishing e-mail. Then I go to us-cert.gov and fill one out. I also forwarded it to [email protected].
I started to search around for the name of the person to whom the site belonged, and I find it's the name of a prominant investment banker in California. I looked around, and was quickly convinced that it couldn't be this guy, even though it's the same first name, middle initial and last name as the registered name on the account. So I go back to the whois and find an e-mail address.
I enter the site from the e-mail address and find out that it's Jr. who it's registered to, and the site on the e-mail address shows me that Jr. is a web designer who owns his own web marketing company.
So I go into a never-used e-mail account and send a note to Jr., Sr. (who's e-mail address is readily available since he's also a grad school professor at a reputable college) and Jr's business partner letting them know that I was reporting them to everyone for the phishing site.
A few moments later, I get a reply from ebay saying that the e-mail is indeed a phishing e-mail and that they've contacted the correct authorities. I go back to the guy's family website, and it's completely shut down. I mean, I'm not just getting 404's or unable to load page errors, I mean that nothing is loading there. It looks like it's been completely turned off.
Small victory for me today.
So I run over to godaddy.com and do a whois. Conveniently enough, they register their name with godaddy, so I send godaddy an anti-phishing e-mail. Then I go to us-cert.gov and fill one out. I also forwarded it to [email protected].
I started to search around for the name of the person to whom the site belonged, and I find it's the name of a prominant investment banker in California. I looked around, and was quickly convinced that it couldn't be this guy, even though it's the same first name, middle initial and last name as the registered name on the account. So I go back to the whois and find an e-mail address.
I enter the site from the e-mail address and find out that it's Jr. who it's registered to, and the site on the e-mail address shows me that Jr. is a web designer who owns his own web marketing company.
So I go into a never-used e-mail account and send a note to Jr., Sr. (who's e-mail address is readily available since he's also a grad school professor at a reputable college) and Jr's business partner letting them know that I was reporting them to everyone for the phishing site.
A few moments later, I get a reply from ebay saying that the e-mail is indeed a phishing e-mail and that they've contacted the correct authorities. I go back to the guy's family website, and it's completely shut down. I mean, I'm not just getting 404's or unable to load page errors, I mean that nothing is loading there. It looks like it's been completely turned off.
Small victory for me today.