I publish a private message board for fans of my favorite college
basketball team. Someone whom I don't know personally "bamboozled" an
invite to this private board by posting to me on a public board; see
link: http://www.voy.com/54558/3/617.html. Later on on this same
board, the same person copy-and-pasted several threads from my private
board onto this public board, causing me no real personal harm but
damaging the reputation of a sportswriter who also happens to be a
friend. I would like to track down this individual, who provided the
email address as shown, stk611@aol.com, and whose IP is 24.29.78.46.
The IP is a RoadRunner IP and the post originated from the Albany
area. The good news is that the IP has appeared on other occasions on
this and other public boards, so apparently RoadRunner is not like AOL
with constantly changing IPs. As for the email address, friends who
have AOL have said that no profile is available for that address. I
have emailed that address on two different occasions but have not
received any replies. Can you help in any way? I am not looking to
press any charges or anything along those lines, but I would like to
know who the culprit was for my own personal satisfaction. Thank you
for any help you can provide!

Hi guyf,

  Good day and thanks for the question. FInding out the person who
uses that IP address is next to impossible. Since you mention that the
IP is a static one, we know that, that IP belongs to him/her.

  Doing a traceroute of the IP traces it to a roadrunner account in
Albany, New York. The identity of the person is available with the ISP
and the ISP only. In your case, the ISP is not morally obligated to
reveal the person's identity since no Denial of Service attack or
threat is being performed. In fact, revealing the person is a
violation of their privacy policy.

The owner information for the IP :
ServiceCo LLC - Road Runner NET-ROAD-RUNNER-1
13241 Woodland Park Road
Herndon, VA 20171
US
Netname: ROAD-RUNNER-1
Netblock: 24.24.0.0 - 24.29.255.255
Maintainer: SCRR
Coordinator:
ServiceCo LLC  ZS30-ARIN  abuse@rr.com
1-703-345-3416

As far as the email address is concerned, the same applies. AOL will
not reveal the person's identity unless criminal charges are pressed
against the entity.

This is as far as the legal stuff goes.

RR.com Privacy Policy
http://www.rr.com/rr-privacy/


If you feel this person is someone you know, there are ways of finding
out, though success is not guaranteed.

The easiest thing to do is to check the e-mail headers of e-mails you
receive. If you find IP addresses matching, you have your person.
Furthermore, since the IP is static, all e-mails from the person
should contain the same IP.

Another thing you can do is to create a webpage with an embedded
script which stores a visitor's IP in a file. Ask the person you
suspect to visit that site. If the IP matches, you have your person.

Yet another alternative is possible if the suspect uses a messenger.
Install a firewall and attempt to send a file to the suspect through
the messenger. Check the firewall log, and note the IP address. If the
IP addresses match, you have your person.

If the person is a total stranger, then I can confidently say that you
will not be able to find out who he is unless he is sending out threat
messages.

Have a good day.

Cheers,
aditya2k

Search Terms
IP address owner
user of an IP address

---

Clarification of Answer by aditya2k-ga on 16 Aug 2002 06:43 PDT

AOL's  Civil Subpoena Policy
http://legal.web.aol.com/aol/aolpol/civilsubpoena.html

Thanks to expertlaw-ga for the link

The ISP may not reveal the person's identity to you but you can still
file a complaint with them and they may kick the person off their
system. Won't stop them or anything since they'll just sign up
somewhere else but it may give you some satisfaction. ISP's will
reveal identity of their users in cases like credit card fraud: we
trace people all the time that way and turn them over to the police.

Not much there that I didn't know. I was hoping there was some
"backdoor" way of getting the IP address holder's identity; I imagine
there are IT people out there capable of pulling this off. Thanks
anyway.