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My familiar received some emails from a man she meets at dating site. The man sent her his photos by email. In them he made some attempts that looked like phishing so I decided to lookup more information about him. I found that those photos are easily accessible in Facebook and belong to a man with a quiet good reputation living in US. All emails came from different IP addresses but some of them are located in Ghana:

197.251.136.205
197.251.164.116
197.251.140.152

and other one in Nigeria:

41.184.75.187

and the last is known to be used by spammers.

Is there a way this man can be prosecuted?

curiousguy
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Andrei Botalov
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  • I feel like its not such a big issue to be prosecuted and it will be taken into consideration only if you are sure about the phishing and The actual individual using those Ips. He might be using a proxy or others. – Krish23 Jul 30 '12 at 08:53

2 Answers2

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Theoretically speaking: maybe, at the moment you just have a possibility and no actual proof. (Just IP addresses aren't enough they are circumstantial, the police will need to at least find proof on his computer (which in most cases is also, at most, considered circumstantial))

Realistically: Not a chance. It's Ghana, the chance you will get anything done there within a reasonal time span and without spending money is smaller than the probability easter and christmas happening on the same day. In those type of countries bribes are often more common than justice. This may sound rude, but it's unfortunately the truth.

There's a nice paper about cybercrime in Ghana here.

Lucas Kauffman
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While Lucus, covers most of it, although the Internet Email Spammers and phishers can't be prosecuted, there are a number of thing one can do to disrupt their business:

  1. If the individuals use free email address, report them along with the full message with the header they've sent to the appropriate email host. They'll suspend their accounts and ban their IPs.

  2. If they're doing it from their own domain, then you can start an Internet IP Blacklist request at websites like:

  3. Save a copy of a phish'ed page's source and send it to the original site. They'll add it to their list of websites to deny referrals from.

This may not be much but it should definitely affect them. :|

Rohan Durve
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