Internet Identity Theft

[illone]

Ok,

Here is the short version of what a close friend of mine is dealing with right now.

Some interenet weirdo somehow hacked her email accounts, obtained personal information, signed on to her AIM account, created a new AIM account with a similar name and contacted her entire old list of friends with personal information, etc.

My question to all of you:

Have you ever experienced anything of this nature before?

If you have, what did you do about it?

Supposedly she has tried calling AOL and Yahoo and they didn't take her seriously.

Wouldn't there be a way to get the person's IP Address and do a reverse check to see who that IP is registered to?

Any help is appreciated. I am trying to assist her in any way I can.

[Leonard Washington]

so the hacker is just talking to her friends, not opening credit card accounts and such?

if its just chatting i would just inform my friends and get a new screen name. if its more serious than that, i can't believe aol doesn't want to help. maybe call the police.

otherwise you have to trick the person to starting a direct connection (fire sharing, voice chat or web cam va netmeeting)then use the netstat command. Go to start, run, type in cmd, type in the command “netstat -n”. You'll see your own ip address on the left then the other person's on the right.

C:\WINDOWS>netstat -n

Active Connections

Proto Local Address Foreign Address State

TCP 123.123.123.12:1138 123.0.11.00:0123 ESTABLISHED

you can't do with during normal chatting or your get the msn or aol server addy.

[Bucaro]

Call the state police or a federal office. They should have the means to deal with these sorts of issues

[stevenaa]

If they are savvy, their behind a proxy and you'll never get their address.

[Leonard Washington]

Originally posted by stevenaa

If they are savvy, their behind a proxy and you'll never get their address.

muhahaha

[illone]

Originally posted by stevenaa

If they are savvy, their behind a proxy and you'll never get their address.

Probably the case. I know nothing about this sort of thing, just feel bad for my friend figured someone here might have a tidbit of experience.

Thanks for the replies so far guys.

[FBChick]

I would think first and foremost, preventing the hacker or any other hacker from getting any more info would be first and foremost.

Then, like most have said change all acounts and password info, then just inform friends that it's an imposter and here's her new account and get on with her life. Be thankful the worst they did was try to hijack her internet social life.

[Larry]

If this person isn't after credit card numbers, but all he's doing is attacking your friends, then I'd say the odds are really high that this is something personal.

The person who's doing this is somebody you know, and you're the only person he's doing it to. This doesn't strike me as something that someone does to a stranger.

This also means it's entirely possible that it's somebody your friends know, too. And your friends might well be able to help you narrow things down.

But no, I don't have anything specific to offer.

[Kevin West]

Tell your friend to get rid of AOL. Their security.... isn't. Till then, tell her to empty her cache every time she logs off. Otherwise, the hackers can access any forms, cc#'s, etc.

[illone]

Yea, I don't think he got any CC information but then again he somehow was able to get into ALL of her email accounts. I'm gonna talk to her again tomorrow and see if any new stuff has surfaced.

She won't even turn on her PC at home because of all this and definitely will never use AIM again for as long as she lives.

[Fred Jones]

All the ISP's, including AOL, make log files of all transactions going across their networks. However, each ISP (Internet Service Provider) keeps that information on their servers for different lengths of time. I doubt any ISP is going to provide you with the information. Even if you obtained this bad persons' IP Address it would just come back assigned to an ISP.

It is my understanding that if the police want the information they contact the ISP and request it through a subpoena. Usually, the police request the information ahead of the subpoena so the ISP can save the information before it is deleted off their servers. When the police obtain the subpoena the ISP provides the information. A valid IP address is assigned to every user account you set up at home. I.E., if you have Verizon DSL or Cox Cable they track the IP address that is assigned to your specific account by the date and time and usage. For a University, they can, if they choose, track what IP address they assign to students. For Instant message account, however, this is not the case. ISP’s cannot tell you who owns a particular AIM account since they don’t track that information. It is simply not affordable for them to do so and they really don’t need the information anyway.

Lastly, I agree with the poster who said that this sounds personal. Strangers don’t usually single people out in this manner. They just want personal information like Name, DOB and SSN so they can create credit card accounts and spend your money.

As a side note, the best free source for determining who owns an IP address can be found at http://www.samspade.org/

Some official sites are www.allwhois.com, www.whatismyipaddress.com and of course the main site at http://www.iana.com/

[Darth Tater]

Inform the police but there's probably little they can do (will do?) though if it escalates, you have documentation for when it started (if its real bad, you may have to contact a lawyer). Change accounts and tell friends. Of course, if it is one of the "friends" as others have suggested, this may not help. Do a google search on your name and look at any unfamiliar postings. If they're offensive, the webmasters will generally remove them. Fred Jones made some excellent suggestions. Yes, I have had this happen to me.