Hey guys, I'm going to be dead honest with you, so please reserve your judgements, or even personal opinions of what I do, until you read my entire post.
Whilst I do a spot of domaining around niche pop-cultural markets, I also work for an affiliate marketing group, so I also track down a lot of you domainers. A lot of the methods used by these scammers are the same methods I use. The difference being that I'm not going to rip you off, as it's not in my best interest.
My business model works on me making money from you making money... symbiotic.
That being said, I got this particular job because I'm good at data forensics, and tracking people down, even if they register through proxies like Moniker.
So, the tracking methods:
Mallie and gingeman are close.
One method IS to go to these forums, see who's new, but it's rare that they would use this method. It's time intensive, it takes a very patient mind, and someone that's able to draw links between something as subtle as a forum signature and a site. So the scammers that don't have the best English (read: smarts) don't do it that much.
Tracking Method #2: Reverse registrar lookup. Both Domaining & Scamming can be VERY profitable, so if you've got the money, and the payoff is good enough, you can actually buy lists of WhoIs info from DomainTools.
It's not a random list either. You can lookup a single email address or person's name, and get a list of up to 30,000 domains that they own, provided you can pay for it (about $10,000US for the full 30,000 domains)
Tracking Method #3: Suckers Lists (â I don't, and never will, work with these)
Believe it or not, these scammers generally know each other, and will swap databases.
These databases have as much info as they have gathered on you, including personal notes, and what you have, or have not, fallen for in the past.
Most importantly, they have a record of when you FIRST BOUGHT INTO THE DOMAIN MARKET. That's how they manage to target n00bs.
If they see a new name/email address that doesn't have a whole heap of domains registered to it, they know you're new to the game. If you've been around the track a few times, they'll generally ignore you.
The most insidious thing about the suckers lists is that once you've been suckered, they'll generally tell each other that you're ripe for it, because if people fall for it once, they'll usually fall for it 2-3 more times before catching on.
