Tired of SPAM? Who isn’t? Want to discourage more of it but don’t know how? in this post I’m going to go through how you can find out who it is by decoding a http://bit.ly/ link and sending the affiliate or other network the info that whoever is promoting this offer is sending SPAM.

Now on to the genesis of this article.

I received an email the other day that was obviously SPAM. How can you tell if it’s spam? it’s all about the to: field. (the … are mine) This to address looks to be set up as a group on a larger Web site that is being used to spam a scraped email list. Of course that’s not my email address so I looked at the cc: and I saw the telltale sign of spam. there were a lot of emails that started with “cs”. my email starts with “csciu” and is not in the short list on my email client so I doubt I’m going to figure out who sent this SPAM my way unless I get the security department of this large web site involved.

So , How do I track them down? If I can’t immediately trace it back I’m not going to take the time to get in a dialog with a security department as I don’t really want to threaten a multi-billion dollar company. I’d rather stay under the radar.

So Here’s what I did.

all throughout the SPAM message I see the same link repeated over and over

http://bit.ly/[removed]

“stupid bit.ly tricks”

I don’t want to just click on the link I might get malware/spyware/trojans sent my way so I do the cautious thing. I add a + (plus symbol) to the end of the link. so copy and paste into the browser and added the + and voilà I have  all kinds of juicy data about this link.  I have the destination url without it just redirecting me to the offer of a legit offer. but I also can see how many other have clicked on it and when I looked it was over 22,000 in the past month.

I look at the  URL  which turns out to be safe it’s just  a sales page link to a clickbank.com hosted product.   I can tell by the  hoplink.clickbank.com at the end  but the rest of it i’s encrypted to prevent me from knowing what product and who’s affiliate link it is.

Not To Worry!

I just have to  go to http://www.clickbank.com/hoplink_decoding.htm and enter the link which will look like this

and you get your spammers clickbank user ID:  which in this case was ” bokharapk ” now all I have to do is report this affiliate here : http://www.clickbank.com/reportproblem.html

Now I’m sure one or two reports are not going to make life horrible for this guy but if others of you have had this garbage sent to your email and you also contact Clickbank then with enough complaints Clickbank will make this guys life more difficult even withhold payment. If we make it harder to get paid the spam will be reduced.

Sadly with the costs so low to send millions of emails these days and the robotic software that makes it simple to collect millions even billions of email addresses there will always be spam. But with the tools we have at our hands , we can uncover the legitimate companies like clickbank who are being abused as we are. Clickbank will take action against the bad actors out there to protect their own corporate image. and this will send the message to spammers that says “if you spam you don’t get paid.” and since it’s all about the money for Spammers this is the power we have to get this email clogging garbage off our systems.

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