What's the best way to report an email scammer? Is there one?

[johnnypark]

Both myself and my supervisor have been receiving emails requesting information and to purchase some of the literature that our office sells (most of it pertains to rehabilitation from brain injury). Some of the people who contact us are impaired from injuries and don't always spell well, have poor grammar, or have difficulty putting their sentences together, so the more obvious signs of scams (Nigerian businessmen with poor grammar looking to do a deal with you!) aren't as easy to pick up on.

This guy put a believable letter together (found you on google, would like to purchase some of your literature, etc). Wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt, she replied to download our PDF catalogue from the website, get the order #s and quantities, etc, and send them to her along with the order form filled out with a credit card # and contact info. Well, he did all of it, making it look believable. He said the order was to be shipped to New Zealand, but our office has been involved with international conferences and is involved in research projects which have been recognized nationally & internationally, so none of these things seemed improbable.

After a few exchanges, though, it was obvious it was a scam. She was content to tell him she couldn't help him and add him to the block list, but I'm sick of this crap, especially when it comes to trying to take advantage of state-funded research which is doing a lot of good.

I'm not naive, I'm assuming there's little to no effective way to track him or report him, but I figured I'd ask anyway. According to this site, Gmail is a breeding ground for it:

Finally, the popular Internet-based email services differ greatly in their use of IP addresses in email headers. Use these tips to identify IP addresses in such mails. Google's Gmail service omits the sender IP address information from all headers. Instead, only the IP address of Gmail's mailserver is shown in Received: from. This means it is impossible to find a sender's true IP address in a received Gmail.

I believe that the site is correct, the IP in the header was traced as a private IP with no country association. Am I just wasting my time? I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd like to see a scammer get what's coming to him, but the anarchy that is the internet makes it very difficult to do anything like it

 

[vherub]

nothing may come of it, but the fbi is the place to report these internet scams to:

http://www.ic3.gov/default.aspx

 

[Liquid 2]

IP addresses don't mean SHIT. Even if they were there, it wouldn't help you.

Nothing you can do but to get over it and stay sharp.

 

[mtxbass1]

[quote name='Liquid 2']IP addresses don't mean SHIT. Even if they were there, it wouldn't help you.

Nothing you can do but to get over it and stay sharp.[/QUOTE]

This. An IP address can be spoofed quite easily in email correspondence.

 

[johnnypark]

[quote name='Liquid 2']IP addresses don't mean SHIT. Even if they were there, it wouldn't help you.

Nothing you can do but to get over it and stay sharp.[/QUOTE]

Yeah, short of them being a real amateur, I was expecting this to be the case. The people that send out the shit like my supervisor got know what they're doing, or else there'd be less of it because people would stop them.

Since we're a public/state-funded university, it might be easier to pursue it (like through the FBI, like vherub suggested) but I don't think she or myself have that much time or interest in it.