"What can a company do when its domain name has been spoofed? In the
past three days, we have received over 1,200 bounced emails that appear
to have come from us. The e-mails are for a refinancing company. I have
tried to trace the e-mails through the headers, but they are masked. I
even tried submitting a phony refinance request to see if I can get them
to call me. How can I get this to stop? How can I report these people?
And how can I avoid our domain getting blacklisted as a spammer for something
someone did to us? If this can happen to a little company like ours, it
is happening to others as well." -- Angie Keating, Reclamere,
Inc.
You're not alone; this has happened to me, also. To research your question,
I consulted with Laura Atkins of Word
to the Wise, LLC, an expert on e-mail abuse and deliverability issues.
She said that most public blacklists don't list the spammer's domain name
but his IP address instead, that spammers sometimes use open proxies overseas
that hide their true IP address. It's possible that your domain might
be listed in some blacklist somewhere, but if no one is actually bouncing
your mail as a result, you don't need worry too much about it. When your
mail is being blocked, however, you must take action.
Unfortunately, there's not much recourse for people with this problem.
To nab the spammers doing this to you, you must "follow the money," determine
who is benefiting monetarily from the spam. Then get yourself an Internet-savvy
lawyer and take the spammer to court. In California and some other states,
there is a specific law that makes it illegal to spoof the return address,
making it easier to go after such spammers. Otherwise your court case
would have to be based on case law rather than existing statutes, an even
more expensive proposition.
I encourage you to lobby your legislators for effective federal laws
against spamming that (1) aren't watered down so much by the direct marketing
industry that they don't do any good, but at the same time (2) are not
so restrictive that they make it impossible to conduct legitimate, opt-in
e-mail marketing.
