Well this morning I had my first encounter with credit card fraud. While checking my credit card statement this morning I saw a charge from Absolute-Soft.com for $9.95. I contacted them by E-mail and got no response. After that, I contacted my credit card company and filed a dispute on the charge. That will take about a month to sort out.

Now being in the Web hosting industry, you learn about how Web hosts deal with these types of folks. Web hosts generally hate finding slime like this on the servers they run. So that left me with tracking down the folks who were hosting this dishonest Web site. For good measure, I decided to find out who the domain name register was as well.

Well after a few whois searches and trace routes later I had my targets. SAGO Networks was the Web host and Register Fly was the domain name register.

First I contacted SAGO Networks (via the abuse team) and I have some good news to report. Just a few hours after my first E-mail was sent, they had terminated the account. Score one for the good guys, Absolute-Soft.com is no longer up and running.

How about the domain name register? As of right now I haven’t heard back from them yet. If I do hear from them, I’ll update this post to let you know what they did or didn’t do.

So that just goes to show you that you never have to play the role of the victim in these types of situations. Hopefully this will help somebody else in my situation get a little pay back when it comes to credit card fraud.

Listen to the Web Hosting Show, Podcast 51 – Credit Card Fraud!

Update: I have gotten several E-mails from folks who have still gotten hit with this scam. I’m sorry to hear about it, but there isn’t much I can do. After getting so much E-mail, I can’t promise I can get back to each and every one of you. The best thing to do is contact your bank or credit card company and let them know about the charges.