Reporting Spam and Phishing

How many of you do this and does it do any good?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I often feel obliged to report spam, scams and phishing emails that I receive. I generally do a "who is" to determine the hosting company before forwarding it to their abuse@ address. When I get a reply email telling me that the offender's account has been terminated it gives me some satisfaction even though I know that they probably have thousands of email accounts.

Am I wasting my time? How many people here report spam and scammers and do you think that it it is worth taking the time to do this?

[ronin]

I get in excess of 50 phishing emails a day (pretending to be from eBay, from PayPal and from numerous banks). Beyond deleting them I am not prepared to waste any more time on them.

[Mr Bo Jangles]

Well, I did so a few times for PayPal because the e-mails were just so deadly and I'm sure many, many people would have made a mistake and responded. But I see little point now - I'm sure PayPal have a pretty good handle on how much is going on - they just need to get the law-makers in every country to help them stop this crime.

[oneguy]

If I even investigated the headers of all of the spam I get on a daily basis, I don't think I'd have time to do anything else. So, unfortunately, no.

These days, I usually give unique emails to almost anyone who requires an email for something. It's not so much that I want to bust them trading or selling lists. It's because if they do, I can easily filter out and trash email headed for that address. Anything sent to info@, sales@, webmaster@, and a few others also get trashed automatically.

How many people here report spam and scammers and do you think that it it is worth taking the time to do this?

I used to think it was worth the time. The loss of my time and feeling of hopelessness eventually changed that for me. I also don't have the time or inclination to deal with retaliation. I'll still applaud those of you who do keep trying.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I should have said that I have given up on the ebay and paypal scammers. There does not seem to be any point. I have recently been getting a few lotter winning notifications every day and I tend to report them.

What puzzles me is that their schemes provide contact details so how come they never seem to get caught?

[truezeta]

I usually will forward the email to the abuse department, but nothing as detailed as looking up whois information and getting IP addresses.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

The IP address is readily available in the message header.

[Nybo]

There are at least a couple of automated reporting systems. You just need an account and then you can forward or copy/paste your spam. I use one of those systems and in my active periods the amount of received spam seems to drop.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Yes, but why don't they ever get caught? You would think the authorities would be able to catch a few of them and hang them out to dry as examples?