| LED Digest 1532: Verifying IPs to Reduce Fraud |
|
|
|
================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest ................................................. March 6, 2003 Issue #1532 ................................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Site Revamps and Outsourcing ==-- ~ M. Romen "To me, it's about ethics, not the mighty buck." --== Online Credit Cards & US Dollar ==-- ~ Mary Lee "...most of my buyers were International...and PayPal does not work well for them at all." ~ Dudley Dix "...South Africa...is not on the list of countries with which anyone can do business through PayPal." --== International Fraud Protection ==-- ~ Martyn Gay "Generally ARIN.net is a good starting point..." ~ Joe Pabito "...our world is such a small place without borders and no sense of time in cyberspace." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Sender Warranted Email & Habeas ==-- ~ Anne P. Mitchell --== In-House Web Design ==-- ~ Ivan J. Jimenez ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: M. Romen Subject: that neighborly spirit and where to find good help in America > I think that some people need to realize that the world > is larger than just the US... as a non-American can I > just say that I get really annoyed by the patriotism often > expressed by Americans. - Khun Sanuk, LED 1531 I find it interesting that people out side of the U.S. will defend their rights to solicit work from people in the U.S. and yet criticize Americans who support their fellow Americans (yep, see the flag wave) by offering them work in a difficult economy. One wonders why people in less economically fortunate don't seek work locally? Same reason... greed... they get paid more by Americans. It's a fact of economic law that those who spend their monies outside of their countries create class divisions. Yep... the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. To me, it's about ethics, not the mighty buck. Where to find a highly skilled American if they will code your web site for less than $50 /hour? Place an ad on the Job Bank, Dice.com, Hot Jobs, Career Strategies, ask your Chambers of Commerce (or look at their sites for their membership talents), advertise in free classifed newspapers, contact online networking groups in your area by doing a search for: "your city" "freelance web developer" or "freelance web designer". And ALWAYS ask for: 1. samples of their work and 2. three references of former clients. You'd be surprised what money can buy you in this difficult time. Really surprised. I belong to an online group comprised of 400 members - extremely skilled technical experts and web designers all looking for more work as their work load dries up and goes outside of the country. If I were to suggest they leave their friends and families to move outside of America and give up their lives here to compete alongside the people who underbid them, they'd throw stones at me! In other words, you probably won't find any takers. Notice, the CEOs of large corporations still reside in their American houses with all their amenities and enjoy their freedom. Why don't we move? Why should we? We don't want to live anywhere else. We like it here. We want to work here - where we grew up. The web may be huge, infinite in fact... but let's hope our "love your neighbors as yourself" value... will never be overshadowed by new communications technologies. Remember when everyone in your local neighborhood looked out for each other and you could call on each other if you needed help? I hope those days never end. And P.S. - I do pay 3 times more for my "made in America" car and it IS extremely well-made and reliable. (I got a great deal!) :) M. Romen ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Mary Lee Subject: Credit cards > My business has prospered since I was able to charge > and accept foreign currency payments via my PayPal > merchant account. - Philip Scriver, LED 1531 I started a new site selling murder mystery games that I write. Before this time I was using only PayPal and they worked fine for me then. With this new site I was finding that most of my buyers were International, most especially the UK & PayPal does not work well for them at all. They had to sign up for an account and wait for their member number to show up on their statements before they could use paypal. A lot of web business is done on impulse, most especially downloadable games. I found I had no choice but to find another 3rd party processor unless I wanted to keep losing sales or pay the large merchant account fees. I found www.paysystems.com and they are working great. I offer the option of either Paypal or Paysystems now and my sales have really taken off since. Most of my US customers use Paypal and the rest use Paysystems. So if you are selling outside the US & use Paypal I would suggest adding another processor or you are just losing money. Mary Lee Dinner and a Murder Mystery Games www.dinnerandamurder.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Dudley Dix Subject: Credit cards I recently tried to buy software from a USA company and pay by credit card. Unfortunately they only use PayPal for payments. I say unfortunately because I live in South Africa, which is not on the list of countries with which anyone can do business through PayPal. I cannot open a merchant account with them to receive payments and I cannot open a customer account to make payments. No business can be done either way through PayPal from South Africa. I had to find a third party software vendor to buy what I should have been able to buy direct at a much lower price. This led me to check what other countries are excluded. Of the 57 countries with which I have done business, 29 are excluded. That is 50%. Granted, my major business is with countries that are on the list. However, if I traded from a country that is on the list and used PayPal's services then I would be cutting out about 1 in 3 of my orders, based on past history. Dudley Dix Dudley Dix Yacht Design http://dixdesign.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Martyn Gay Subject: Fraud protection > Check the IP address. Ensure your developer / software > includes these in the order and learn how to look them up. - Martyn Gay, LED 1523 > It would be very useful if you could tell us exactly > how to look [IPs] up. - Peter D'Aprix, LED 1531 Peter, Firstly, once your developer (or yourself!) has included IP addresses in the orders you should have something like: 213.212.70.144 Now things are a bit more complicated than they used to be because the registries that were set up to allocate these numbers keep splitting. The main ones are: www.arin.net (for USA, Canada, etc) www.ripe.net (Europe) www.apnic.net (Asia /Pacific /Australia) But now you will also find references to LACNIC (Latin America) and even Brazilian IPs are now handled by a separate body as are Korean ones. This is an example of the way I approach looking up IPs. An order comes in from 213.212.70.144 and the card holder claims to be in the USA. As ARIN.net handles the USA I go to that site, enter this IP number in the top right box and press "search whois". Instantly it tells me that this number is assigned to RIPE, ie Europe. I now know that the card holder claims to be in the USA but made the order in Europe. Of course this could be genuine (he may be on holiday) but we sell shopping cart software - not a normal holiday purchase. I'd investigate further, calling the person if need be. If I wanted to look up more information, I would visit RIPE.net and go to "WHOIS DB" page. Here I do the same thing with the IP address and it will actually tell me which ISP holds that address - its in the UK and it even tells me which ISP holds it. Of course I actually knew it was in the UK because it is the IP of one of our websites! Generally ARIN.net is a good starting point because if the address isn't an American one, it will tell you which registry to look in. Also watch out for satellite providers... you might have an American IP but it is a satellite provider for Africa so the order may be from there. Look carefully at who owns the IP address - does it match with what you know about the order? Most fraudsters are complete clowns, we regularly get orders from APNIC claiming to be in the USA and these are almost certainly fraud. It's tricky but not impossible to fake your IP address, this would normally involve hijacking a server in your desired country and using that to place the order, but few have the skills to do this. After a while you get to recognise addresses, 200.* is Latin America, 12.* is AT&T, you can become a real geek with this stuff, and you will learn alot more about how the internet is put together which can be surprisingly useful. Regards, Martyn Gay www.cactushop.com ASP Shopping Cart Software ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Joe Pabito Subject: Fraud protection One way of checking the source IP is by going to the organization that regulates internet IP addresses which is ICANN. You can go to www.arin.net and check someone's IP for the U.S. , www.ripe.net for European sites and www.apnic.net for Asia. It will show you also under who's name is the site registered and some even include contacts in cases of abuse. I was constantly bombarded by this question when I was moderating our chat room. Being a moderator, you have to constantly check the people that join the chat rooms and this is one way of getting to know your visitors. Ours is a global community and it is so humbling to know that our world is such a small place without borders and no sense of time in cyberspace. Joe Pabito texlabels.net ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Anne P. Mitchell Subject: Re: Habeas > Habeas, Inc. is quickly installing their "version" of > "spam control" on ISP's everywhere... As are many > of the spamfiltering software designers like > SpamAssassin, Cyber Sitter and others. - Michael Yost, LED 1531 Michael, Adam, and All, That is really completely untrue. We are not "installing" anything anywhere. We simply give receiving systems *one* way of measuring, out of many, whether or not an email is spam. We tell them "if you find this in the email, you can know it is not spam, and so DON'T FILTER IT!" > [The LED Digest] would cost you upwards of $3,000 a > month in licensing fees paid to Habeas... it's right from > Habeas, Inc, website Well, no, it isn't really right from our website. Newsletter licenses (for which LED Digest would qualify) are only $200 /year, so long as the content is not *primarily* advertising or marketing in nature. From our site, at: http://www.habeas.com/en-US/Senders/Overview/index.html "Small Business Newsletter Enterprises: If your primary business model is the sending of bulk email newsletters at no charge to the recipients, the content of which is not primarily marketing or promotional material, and your annual business revenue is not more than $100,000.00, then you may sign a Business License, rather than a Bulk Commercial Mail license, under our Small Business Newsletter exception." If a newsletter is primarily editorial, informational, or educational in nature, then it qualifies for the $200 /year price. Not $3000 /month. $200 /year. And, to be honest, we are currently looking at raising the $100,000 revenue cap - and would welcome (constructive, reasoned) feedback in that regard. But don't take my word for it. Ask many of your newsletter and e- zine colleagues, such as Wilson Internet, Tidbits, and Lockergnome. All of them paying only $200 /year, and quite happy with the service, as well. > ... we either FIGHT this form of "extortion", or ALL forms > of email as we know it in which Internet Marketing and > Online Businesses depend on will be gone for good... > or very costly to send. And I ask that before you accuse us of all sorts of horrible transgressions, you actually check your facts. You have made a lot of accusations, but never once, not once, did you bother to contact Habeas to make sure that you had it right. > http://nohabeas.megalists.net Please consider joining the > hundreds and thousands... that have joined our organization. > We can stop this insanity before it's too late. <shaking head>..Habeas does not do anything which you can't do yourself. And we certainly have _nothing_ to do with censorship! Do you have to use Habeas? No, of course not. And not using Habeas will have *no* impact on the mail you send. It will continue to be delivered (or not) as it already is. And, indeed, you can always do what we did - contact each of the ISPs and spam filters directly, and ask them to whitelist you. There is nothing stopping you from doing that for yourself! If you don't want to, that's ok too. If you want to pay us $200 /year for all the effort we put into doing that already, that's ok too. But please, stop distorting the facts. We aren't the enemy. /s/Anne Anne P. Mitchell, Esq., CEO http://www.habeas.com/ ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Ivan J. Jimenez Subject: In-house web design I wanted to throw a question out there. I'm sure fellow LED'ers can shed some light... Why is it that the most visually appealing sites I've come across are created in-house and NOT by dedicated web development firms? This is beginning to change but for the most part, of all the businesses that come to me with marketing / promotion inquiries, the best sites (from a visual standpoint at least) were created by in-house developers. This isn't to say that I haven't seen great sites come from web development companies, but those were generally VERY expensive in comparison. Anyway, can anyone help explain why this is the case. Is it that in-house developers have all day every day to tweak their sites or is it that they don't have to worry about SEO whereas an outsourced developer would try to implement the two? Let me know. This is a question that's been boggling me... Thanks! Ivan J. Jimenez cosmicbreath.com ------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1995-2003 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." - Francis Bacon |
