Stop a Blogger Thief
Is someone stealing your Yahoo Group's Posts?
Not long ago, I discovered someone was posting all of my Yahoo Group's messages to a blog on BlogSpot.
It wasn't the first time this had happened and complaints to BlogSpot got the offending blog taken down. But this time we complained in vain.
So detective work to find the thief began in earnest. Unfortunately, most of my efforts were in vain. I found a lot of very interesting articles and learned a lot about JavaScripts and how they are used to aggravate most of us for advertising, but nothing to stop the thief or how to identify the guilty party. I also learned not to jump to conclusions about what I found.
I was almost sure the thief was a member of the group, but since it is a big group with almost 3000 members, trying to find the skunk was going to be a daunting task.
A lot of folks were trying to help, but most of the suggestions led to nowhere. Someone said we could find the thief by trial and error, sending messages direct to each member with a code word and if the code appeared on the blog, then we would identify the thief. Good idea and a LOT of work. Another idea was to delete members until the posting on the blog stopped. Bad idea and never considered.
Then I asked for help from an expert, Les Bain, and he delivered!
First he told me how the thief was doing the deed. He was downloading all of the posts to his email program and then was using a blogger email account to upload the posts to his blog.
Then he told me how to find the thief! The thief was almost certainly using a blogger email account on the group. The typical profile of the Yahoo Group thief is this:
"ID, email@blooger.com, Individual, Date joined, Traditional"
So to find the skunk, a search of the members found one member with a blogger email account. The profile was exactly as predicted.
Just to be absolutely sure this was the right member, I spoofed an email directly to the member and sure enough, it appeared on the blog. Now it was a simple matter to remove and ban the skunk.
If the thief had not been using a blogger email address, we still could have found him through trial and error by spoofing an email to each member and checking to see if it post to the blog. Since we now know the culprit will be downloading mail to an email client, members on No Mail, Daily Digest or Special Notices can be safely eliminated. However most Yahoo Group thieves will almost certainly use a blogger email account to perpetrate the fraud.