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Alert

Reverse url lookup

Sep 26, 2012 2:10AM PDT

From time to time, I receive spoof or phishing e mails from people or "companies" purporting to be someone they are not. The other day, I received one from "Amazon", and I know it was not the real Amazon

Somewhere I read that you can reverse look up these url's to see who this is. Is that so? If so, do you know who it is? I know there are pay look up sites out there, but I think there is a free one also. Thank you!

Discussion is locked

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email
Sep 26, 2012 2:53AM PDT

If you mean the where the email came from then you need to look though the mail headers...tends to be a compromised machine sending them.

If you mean the actual URL they want to try to trick you into clicking. You can go to one of the domain registers and run whois. Networksolutions is one of the largest but there are others for other countries.

All you will generally find is fake information. You could try the ip address and look that up in the ip registry like arin but most likely all you will find is a hosting center. Or it could all map back to a country like china where you will be able to find nothing.

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reverse url look up
Sep 26, 2012 11:04PM PDT

Thanks bill012. That website is great.

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generally
Sep 30, 2012 9:18AM PDT

if you hover over the URL in the email and read where your browser says its truly going in the lower right corner, yo can see amazon is missing, misspelled, or the ending site is something like .cz or some such and thus its a spoof.

I use firefox and it will most of the time flat out warn you, sometimes I like to go to the people who ask for account info and give them fake accounts, wastes their time, all you can really do but if everyone did it, they'd waste a lot of time, sell fake data to not so nice people and it problem make it not worth doing, however most of the time I get a message from firefox anymore saying this is a reported forgery and so I don't bother with it.