Last night, my daughter decided to lay down and watch a movie early, which meant I could get some extra time in to try to push my mage to 60. Just as I sit down, my wife calls from the other room, “Honey, I think someone is scamming me.”

We have had kind of a rough week. First off, someone exploited a hole in our outdated version of Zen-Cart, and sent a Paypal spoof e-mail to every single customer in the store. That tore up a good part of my weekend, trying to upgrade the store, and make sure everything was secure. Then, my mother in law went into the hospital. (She is out of surgery, and expected to come home today!)

So, my wife decided that with all the downtime in the store, and all that had been going on, that she would put a $5 coupon code for her store. $5 off your order, no matter how small. Of course the coupon is only usable once by each customer, but unlimited times otherwise. It turns out, someone decided to create 16 bogus accounts just to rip us off.

My wife had started to notice that she was getting some e-mail bounces, people creating accounts with bogus e-mail addresses. Then they started happening rapidly…. So, naturally, I look at the IP for one of the orders and then search for all orders from that IP. Hmm, 19 of them. But wait, the first 3 are starting in January, and all with the same account. Oddly, her first e-mail hadn’t bounced, so long ago.

It turns out she gave us her real name, e-mail address, physical address, etc. on her first couple of orders. The first thing I did was edit the PHP to block her IP and give her a “Go scam someone else” message. Then, I e-mailed her and told her she wasn’t welcome in our store until she was willing to pay for all of the things she had taken. Furthermore, I told her that I would be reporting to her ISP what happened (not that it will probably do any good). Here is her response.

I have no idea what you are talking about. I have paid for the kits from your shop.

Sure, except that you just e-mailed me from the exact same IP that you have been scamming us from, and now I have the last bit that I need to prove it. Sure enough, in the message headers, her IP proclaims her guilt.

As it turns out, you’re not anonymous, and I am still not level 60.