What is on Your Mind?

Not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I thought I'd start here. Not really a Unix question, but I'm hoping the gurus here can help me in an area I know little about.

Someone got one of my credit card numbers. Tried to use it to charge a bunch of stuff over the internet. The company called me to confirm the order, because they thought something about it was suspicious. They gave me the e-mail address of the person who tried to use my card number.

My question is, what can I find out from the e-mail address? Is there a way to trace it back to the thief? Or at least to find out who his ISP is? Anything? Some website somewhere that would explain this kind of stuff?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

If they've used a "freebie" account such as Hotmail or Yahoo there's probably very little you can do. Microsoft or Yahoo should log IP addresses and logins somewhere, but actually contacting them and speaking to somebody who can trace this information would be tricky - and they've probably used an anonymous portal (i.e. Internet cafe) anyway so tracing that would be next to useless.

As this is a case of fraud, surely your credit card provider, together with the appropriate law enforcement agency, should be persuing and investigating this on your behalf?

Also; the email address they've used is probably a fake anyway - the email order confirmation could have been bounced back, which could be the reason they've contacted you by 'phone.

You could, at best, attempt sending an email to abuse@whatever_domain_the_email_address_uses.com and give them the appropriate information.

Good luck.

Cheers
ZB

Hi !
There is a little trick you can do... send him an e-mail... something like "Hi, dude! Whazzup ? Long time no seen...", and send it with an return receipt request. When the return receipt (or his answer) will come to you, you can see in the e-mail header the IP address from where he sent you that e-mail. After that, with "traceroute IP" you can make an ideea where he is... or, at least, you can find his ISP.
Anyway, it's not the best solution, but it's a good point to start...
Good luck!

You'd think so, but they don't seem very concerned. Probably because it appears the total amount of fraudulent charges is less than $500.

I think I'll move this thread to the lounge area as it's not a purely technical thread.

It's amazing that credit card companies and other financial institutions can be so lazy when it comes to things like this. But when you spend a couple of hundred bucks into your overdraft, they're very quick to start trying to get their money back....

Cheers
ZB