London Varient on Nigeria ID theft scam. trace yahoo IM IP address.

[royofmarshfield]

i have been geting a lot of messages lately from people on yahoo who are saying they are either from london, or some women from somwhere in the us saying they are in nigeria. they are looking to start chating and then say they want to get togeter either have mo go to them or them come to me for marrage, dateing, liveing together or whatever. they say they want me to give them my bank account number plus full name address etc. so they can send money to pay for the travel expences.

my problem is how do i tell a legitimate person who found me on a dateing sight and someone who is trying to scam me. is there some utility that i can use to trace thier IP address so i can determan if they are where they say they are from or if they are a scamer so i can report them to the FBI's internation scam department. i am not looking to hack thier system and dont need the last digits of thier IP address just the first 3 of the 4 numbers so i can see where thier IP is located.

if someone knows of such a utility it would help me a lot and would allso help me report and stop thies scamers from defrauding other less tech savvy people on the net. as a pc tech and tutor i know how important it is to protect people from thies scamers who make the internet a dangerous place to be.

roy sherrill
royofmarshfield@charter.net
royofmarshfield yahoo ID

[royofmarshfield]

thies messages for some reason all seem to come in on my primary yahoo id rather than the subacount id's i have and use for primary contact. i have come to the conclusion that they are somehow hacking the yahoo database or website to get id's so they can spam to several id's at the same time. is there such a utility?

[Eagle_Kiwi]

Hi there Roy ... Welcome to the BBB.
I'm not sure of your question - http://samspade.org will easily show you the source of an IP number ... but if u wanna know how to GET the IP # of a contact in the first place, *I* have no idea.

But geeee, as to whether someone is "genuine" or not... do you REALLY need help there ? How about if there's no mention of or request for $$$ in the first 2 or 3 IMs, then they're PROBABLY relatively "genuine" ?

[miGs]

They seem "genuine scam" to me. This have been occuring to MSN Hotmail as of late. I get mails from unknown persons claiming to be heir of someone that has a lot of wealth in Nigeria. They said they are asking for help where to transfer fund and something like that. So they need my Bank Account name and other valuable informations.

"then say they want to get togeter either have mo go to them or them come to me for marrage, dateing, liveing together or whatever"

Why dont you ask them to come over to you? If they are serious its not impossbile for them to come over at your place. Just a simple test.

Its simply not that easy to trust unknown persons especially if it involves your financial accounts over the net. There is just no GUARANTEE.

[tellmewhoareu]

try this software

http://rathish.sugdil.com


its helpfull to trace the IP address and the city

[fenrirwulf]

Roy,
I have been contacted by someone who sounds almost exactly like your person. She found me on place4friends.com. Same claims of loving me and wanting to move here. She too lives supposedly in london. She claims her client that she supplied clothes too(she owns her own business she claims), is sending me a money order to cash in the amount of $8,000(money orders can only go as high as $1,000). She said to wire her the cash once I cashed it so she can pay her bilss and get the ticket to come here. she always avoids specifics about how she plans to get all her stuff here. etc. Well, I have ysniffer running this time to find out her true location so I can get the FBI and Interpol involved.

[zhugeliang]

The easiest way to distinguish between who is trying to scam you and who is legitimat is to use a different name for chatting with from the one you have listed for contacting on a dating service. This way those who chat with you don't know your dating name and can't possibly IM you regarding that service if they are in a chat room with you. As far as tracing the IP address goes, don't bother. There are much better ways to get around figuring out if they are scamming you or not than by trying to figure out where they are from.

For example: they will ask you for information you ought to know you shouldn't give out (ie. Credit Cards, Bank accounts, Usernames/Passwords, Social Security, Address, Phone Number, etc.) If they ask for any of those just ignore them and move on, or tell them that they don't need to know that at the present time. IF they are a legitimate contact then they will chat with you more than once (I'm pretty sure they would, I mean why wouldn't they) and scammers will not.

[fenrirwulf]

Actually she blew it by calling me the other day. The country code on my caller ID showed she was calling from Nigeria and it was pretty obvious by the way she sounded that she was not a white woman like she claims. Once the money order arrives I will turn it over to local authorities. I didn't lose any money, just my time and emotional commitment during that time period. Oh well! Live and learn.

[Dermot]

It's common sense to not fall for situations like these.

You DO NOT give money to anybody online unless you know them personally or its financial transaction.

You need to look at the situation and think about how if this person had her own business why would she need to be online looking for money or love.

You dont give money to anybody unsecure over the net nor do you give some woman you dont see money over the net.

What these people do is called online fraud and they use social engineering to mind melt you into feeling almost sorry for them to give them money.

You you get a pm from one of these people again use the security feedback on Yahoo! below to report them and send a carbon copy of their transcript with it.

security@yahoo-inc.com

Also read up on this page for some partial imformation on social engineering.

http://security.yahoo.com/online_interaction.html