Pros and Cons of reporting to ESPs

I am pleased to receive such well reasoned opinions, based on long standing experience.

The email service providers are not law enforcement, nor do they represent law enforcement. In the US, the law enforcement agency that is responsible for receiving reports on this type of crime is IC3. While we don't encourage them to expect to get their money back, we do in fact recommend that victims who have been scammed file a report with IC3 or the appropriate law enforcement agency.

Speaking from the perspective of a major ISP and ESP, I can comment authoritatively on this assertion. Taking Yahoo! for example, since I am not affiliated with them,

From http://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/utos/utos-173.html

You agree to not use the Yahoo! Services to:

upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available any Content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable;

harm minors in any way;

impersonate any person or entity, including, but not limited to, a Yahoo! official, forum leader, guide or host, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent your affiliation with a person or entity;

forge headers or otherwise manipulate identifiers in order to disguise the origin of any Content transmitted through the Yahoo! Service;

upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available any Content that you do not have a right to make available under any law or under contractual or fiduciary relationships (such as inside information, proprietary and confidential information learned or disclosed as part of employment relationships or under nondisclosure agreements);

upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available any Content that infringes any patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights ("Rights") of any party;

upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, promotional materials, "junk mail," "spam," "chain letters," "pyramid schemes," or any other form of solicitation, except in those areas (such as shopping) that are designated for such purpose (please read our complete Spam Policy);

Another example is GMX. with whom I also have no affiliation
Refer to http://gmx.com/terms.html#Obligations

7.13. You agree and warrant that you shall not use any form of mass unsolicited electronic mail solicitations, news group postings, IRC posting or any other form of "spamming," "phishing," or "mail bombing," and GMX reserves the right to block mail from any source, including outgoing mail from your Account, which GMX believes, in its sole discretion, is being used to send such unsolicited email. While GMX continues to actively review and implement new technology to ensure that its customers neither send nor receive unsolicited email, there is no currently available technology that will totally prevent the sending and receiving of unsolicited email.

7.14. You agree and warrant that you shall not engage in any false, deceptive or fraudulent activities in association with your use of the GMX Services or GMX's Equipment.

7.22 With respect to any advertising content you may transmit through the Services, you agree and warrant that all such advertising content shall comply with all Laws, and shall not result in consumer fraud, product liability, or damage of any kind to any third party.

13.2. You or GMX may terminate this Agreement at any time for any reason, with or without cause. You may terminate by (i) notifying GMX via email, which notification shall be effective upon receipt by GMX, or by certified mail to the address listed herein and (b) closing your accounts for all of Your Services via GMX’s user interface, where GMX has made this option available to you. GMX may suspend performance under or terminate this Agreement and cease transmission of data associated with your Account immediately and without notice and without further liability to you if GMX, in its sole discretion, deems that you have breached any part of this Agreement, including, without limitation, any warranty or obligation set forth in Section 7.

As Limited Liability Companies, ESPs have a legal obligation to set up terms of service that empower them to take remedial action to counter fraud. The very presence of these terms of service places a further obligation on these companies to take action in cases where complaints are reported to them. People often mistakenly believe that the ISPs, ESPs and Domain Name Registrars are only obliged to act pursuant to a court order. From a legal perspective that is far from true. I draw your attention to the frequently used phrase "in its sole discretion - which addresses that situation specifically.

Major service providers do have the power to address these concerns. Across the Internet there are 3 categories of service providers -

Internet Service Providers
Domain Name Registrars
Email Service Providers

My personal experience has been within two of the largest US service providers, where I have had responsibilities across product and service delivery. For over a decade there has been input from various groups to ISPs relating to crime and fraud prevention. Large examples include SpamCop and Spamhaus, together with various less visible various research groups that constantly feed lists of rogue IPs to ISPs for treatment. Microsoft has also become proactive in this arena through the Digital Crimes Unit and successful initiatives in the combat of botnet infrastructures.

I have worked closely with Domain Name Registrars, who have uniformly taken on board the responsibility to enact their Terms of Service to terminate domains used for unlawful purposes. Suspensions number in the thousands per day. This has not been achieved without a considerable campaign to heighten awareness and to draw their attentions to their own Terms of Service.

The success of such operations focused on ISPs and Registrars is born out in the reduction of spam levels over the past 18 months which were not dreamed of beforehand. August 2010 saw a rate of 326 Billion per day fall by January 2010 to 40 Billion and remain at that level throughout the past year.
( See http://www.senderbase.org/home/detail_s ... st18months )

To date, the ESPs have not been as actively participating in this social responsibility. However, just as the tide has turned with the other 2 categories, it is inevitable that we will be seeing the same tide sweeping them along.

"Some men see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not?"

Hi reportandie, and welcome here,

We do understand the TOS of email providers and are very well versed in the TOS of hosters and registrars as we actively work to shut down scammer websites used for advance fee fraud.
Our position is not that we don't report the addresses because email providers can't or won't shut down email accounts, our point is that doing so hinders victims more than it hinders scammers.
Scammers can, and do, open new accounts in minutes. Those new accounts will not be listed on anti scam sites. Which email account a scammer uses doesn't really matter to the scammer. Which he uses DOES matter to the victims, thus to us, however, because the longer the scammer sticks to the same email account and fake names, the more reports of it there will be online - which is currently the best defense for victims.

Dotti's point about reports to mail providers not being the same as reports to law enforcement also still stands.