Marketing & SEO Discussion List - LED Digest

Hi Adam and Everyone,

I am a LED subscriber for years now. I just wanted to share with you a recent episode I had with a spammer on my web site's forums. This might be of interest to others who read this newsletter.

My site's forum, which will remain unamed, was spammed by a porn site owner / employee.  The culprit developed a script that would post on my forum (YABB) 75-100 messages, all identical, in about 10 minutes.  The software would grab an existing set of topic titles and punch out an identical set of titles with his spam message and link to his porn site in the message.

This mess took me 2 hours to clean up.  After being spammed for the second time in 24 hours, I contacted his ISP, hosting company, domain company and his credit card gateway, all by the "abuse@" email address.  Got the typical canned email replies from each. When he spammed me the third time in 24 hours, I picked up the phone.

I called the tech support department at his hosting company first, spoke with an tech who took my problem seriously and gave me other numbers to call in his company.  Then I called his domain company, same technique, tech support.  Afterwards, a call to the tech support at his credit card gateway.

While I never received further contact, his web site was taken down for 8 hours and I have had no more spam attacks from this person.

Keys I found were:

ISP:  Logged IP was used via RIPE whois - http://www.ripe.net/perl/whois

Hosting Company:  used http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jhtml and looked up the name servers, repeated with name servers URL to get techincal support contact and phone.

Domain host:  found with [the same link as above] and went to their site and found tech support contacts

Credit Card Gateway:  I went to the offending web site to "become a customer" and observed the URL of the gateway company after clicking the 'buy' or 'signup' button.  Then went to credit card gateway's web site and called tech support, got numbers and names to call.

Only with the phone calls to tech support and speaking with a concerned person(s), there and elsewhere in the company, did I get help.  They dont want their company to be seen as supporting spammers and all have policies about people who spam and have accounts on their system.

Maybe this will stop him from doing this to others web sites / forums.  I hope this will help someone else who's web site is under spam attacks.

Very Truly Yours,