Why getting stuff posted is so important.

[Wayne]

We are rightly proud of our site, and especially the amount of information posted in this forum. We're trying to post up as much as we can in order to make it as easy as possible for people to do searches of any information their scammer gives them, see it's a scam and then have the tools they need to deal with the scam in the best possible way. That's not the whole story though. We also on occasion get a message from people in law enforcement related to the information posted. We've been asked in the past to explain how we managed to get the real details of a scammer for example. In those cases we can then talk them through the 100% legitimate ways we did it. This is one of the reasons we don't condone hacking here, and hopefully it makes more sense now.

Today was one of those cases. I had an email from someone claiming to be in law enforcement asking about one of the sextortion forms posted on the site as a search of the phone number the scammer had used led him here. Now of course we don't just speak to anyone claiming to be LE. We do our due diligence first. It doesn't take long, and is pretty easy. If for example you claim to be from the FBI and using an FBI email address, we can check to see if the email was really sent from the FBI's email server and not someone on the other side of the world faking the email address.

Anyhow, I had the email request, did the check to make sure they were genuine and then replied answering their question, pointing out some other information on the site and offering up more help if they need it. End result, we've made a new contact in LE in another part of the world who's offered us his help if we ever need it.

And this my friends is why getting that information out there is so important. Not only does it help you and those like you, but it can also help law enforcement gather more information, sometimes before an arrest is made. It's a win/win situation.