Signup to take Free Survey's, Get Paid Money $$$$$$$

 

Question: What exactly is a 'bot'?

To answer your question, a bot is nothing less than an internet robot, that acts and does what it's owner wishes.

Question: I've noticed sometimes there are these bots in chatroom's trying to get me to click on links to adult websites. How can I get them to leave, or take action against them for ruining my chat room experience, and others?

It sometimes is a little more complicated than one might think, but can be done successfully.

Here are some steps to take when dealing with these annoying robots.

Notice where the red arrow is pointing? yes, this is the link that the spammer, robot is trying to get you to go to.

For this particular case, the IP Address of the webserver they are hosting the site on is '207.36.107.32' Usually it will be a domain name, but this guy obviously isn't an amatuer.

Not all spammers are bad, let me remind you. Some do offer good sites, and have no other way of getting out their URL than by offering it through a robot to a wide mass of people. So occasionally there is some justification. *HOWEVER* when it is constant, pornographic, links.. that send you to pay sites, or use deceptive linking, it can become quite a nuisance.

So let's take a closer look, and find out more information about him, this perpetrator.

After doing a reverse DNS lookup of this IP Address, still no domain name or host name is found.

according to www.dnsstuff.com there is no PRT Record, and if you don't know what that means, you can google it.

Fortunately. As slick as this guy thinks he is, there is still a way to catch him. (This is where my Criminal Justice Degree, and Law Background come in handy)

Sometimes in order to catch these individuals you have to give into the 'click'. So we are going to go to 'http://207.36.107.32/homepage3'

Why? well because we want to see what this guy is trying to accomplish. He has domain forwarding setup to push us immediately to another crap site called 'quickrichclick.com'. You sometimes have to look at the motivations behind the individual of sending these links.

On this new web URL that it has brought us to, it is asking for us to sign up to become internet pornographers, in some get-rich-quick scheme, that could be anyone involved in identity theft of social security numbers, to a legitimate business.

Next step. WHOIS Domain lookup, on quickrichclick.com via www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp

This is the information revealed, about the site that the spammer is trying to send you to from the AIM Screen name 'Beth4every1'

You can now, with this information, contact this individual, who will 9 times out of 10 play stupid with you over the phone, or by e-mail as if he doesn't know what you are talking about, until you start mentioning federal criminal statutes, and making threats of reporting him to Interpol, Better Business Bureau (BBB), Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and countless other international, or federal agencies for violating laws he does in fact violate.

Logging, and Screen shots are Key.

Never make threats of physical harm. (Though you may want to :)

There are many other ways of tracking, and catching these individuals.. who often think they are well hidden behind computers.

AIM/AOL often does not deal with this issue, as they learned their lesson from the 1990's dealing with the cost of effectively removing spam is quite pricey so they would rather have an outsourced Indian tell you through tech support after you've waited for 3 hours on the phone that they do not deal with spammers on AIM and that you should just block the individual.

Now, did this remove the bot from the chatroom immediately? No. But if one person, let alone everyone in the chatroom, contacted this company, or the individual who was behind creating this URL.. you could effectively destroy most XXX chat bots.

Let me also remind you that not all spammers are bad. Just the ones that constantly spam, and solicit crap that no one wants or needs.

I have in some cases, setup a bot or two to get the word out about AIM Chat Directory, however, I feel I am helping individuals rather than victimizing them, This guy might say the same thing. But look at what he is trying to achieve, versus what I am, by you clicking on the links. Whether it is an oxymoron or not. I do believe from the countless IM's I recieve that this site does help more people network, and connect together. Learn, and navigate the internet. And up until recently, I have pretty much laid off the much advertising, as word of mouth has gotten around.. and is still getting around. Anyways..... until next time.

Stay tuned, I plan on creating more Featured Articles like this one in the Future. Enjoy.