Reporting abuse to scammer's IP address.

I get a lot of phishing expeditions and attempted Nigerian scams. I've never actually been victimized; most of them are quite obvious. I made the mistake of responding to an email from someone I didn't know only once, and quickly realized that he was attempting a variant on the Nigerian scam (amazing how so many of them actually use the country of Nigeria as part of their scam).

But on a different site I saw advice that attempted scams should be forwarded to both [email protected], and the abuse desk of the scammers IP. My problem is that a whole lot of the scams come from people whose IP is alice.it, where ".it" is short for Italy. Everything I've been able to find online about it is in Italian, which I don't speak. Can anyone tell me how to forward something to their abuse desk? And, incidentally, what are the Italian terms for "Fraud" and "Attempted Fraud?"

Thanks in advance, Wilhelmina1

Reporting phishing sites is good--usually the best thing to do is to forward them to the company being impersonated, as they are in the best position to get the imitators closed quickly.

But for scams--frankly, reporting every run-of-the-mill scam email will be a serious waste of your time, and can even be counter-productive. The most that will generally happen is that the host will (sometimes) close the email address the scammer used (which may belong to the scammer, but may also belong to an innocent party who was phished or hacked.) The scammer will be back on track with a new email address in less than 5 minutes--and any warnings posted about the original address will be lost, so targets of the new address who google the address are going to miss the evidence that the emails are scams.

Thanks. I certainly don't want an innocent to lose his email address, I just want to shut these thieves down. I'm concerned that the people most likely to fall prey to them are also the ones least likely to have the money to lose. Not that I care enough to engage in spambaiting -- I'm not a thrill seeker, and that's a little too dangerous for my blood, though I applaud those who do.

Wilhelmina1