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Reporting Spammers by LocationPlease NOTE: This page hasn't been updated since about 2000. System admins - consult the how to configure sendmail page! As state's attorneys general have become more concerned with Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE), it is easier to at least report spammers to a local governmental agency that might care, especially in the case of obviously fraudulent offers, including illegal multilevel marketing and ponzi schemes. In states like Washington, California, and Nevada, the very act of sending UCE itself may qualify as a violation of civil law, and might be prosecutable by the state. Reporting your receipt may help a state build a case. Many spams contain an address, sometimes just a post office box, but occasionally even a street address. There are ways to get an address, however, just from a phone number. A technique I recently started employing involves using the response phone number listed in many of these ads. Although a number of companies use 800/888 toll-free number, many do use U.S.-based toll numbers. There is a service at Anywho which offers reverse phone number lookups, even on just the starting few digits of a phone number. Take the phone number in one of these spams, and enter it. Selecting "Begins With." Click search. If you get a match, great! Copy the mailing address. If you don't get a match, start removing digits one at a time from the right side, and perform new searches. If you get a match on a single number ending in one or more zeroes, then it's probably the main exchange for a company that has purchased a range of numbers. If you get some random numbers that are similar, you're at least in the geographic area - the three digits after the area code usually define a specific phone company switching office that serves a radius of just a few miles in urban areas. For example, a spam I received recently used the phone number 702-284-5074. I backed out to 702-284-50 (starts with) before getting a match on 702-284-5000, a company that runs answering services for other companies, based in Nevada. Because they have the three zeroes at the end, it's likely that they own all the numbers starting with a 5 in that area code and exchange prefix. A quick trip to http://www.state.nv.us brought me to the Attorney General's page with an email link. I cc'd the Washington State Attorney General's spam address as well as the Nevada AG. (See a list at the bottom of this page of addresses of Attorneys General.) It's unlikely that my email will result in any specific action, but the better you can identify spammers by the state in which they are conducting business (even if they're based elsewhere), and the more people who do so, the more likely lawsuits are to happen, and the more deterrents spammers have from sending more email. The SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) also has a fraud address for reporting stock scams and manipulations, which I've had occasion to use with the "TBTG" spam that I received over 200 copies of from different locations a couple of weeks ago: week: <enforcement@sec.gov> Attorney General & Consumer Protection By State The list below links to the most likely place to file a complaint for that state. A few states, like Washington, North Carolina, and Tennessee, offer an email address to report consumer fraud or UCE to. Most offer an online form to fill out. Most also don't have any information on email consumer protection. You can also try the National Attorneys General Web site for more general information.
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