Background

One of the most common online fraud schemes is scams. Online scammers create accounts using proxy servers in order to seek online anonymity or hide their identities from target websites such as e-commerce sites, social networking sites, online communities, dating, personals, game, voting, blog, and chat communities.

Generally, these scammers use the romance intimation technique as a bait to approach their victims of fraud. This is one of the most common means to perpetrate the fraud.

The online scams are not limited to romance scams, but also the scammers target financial institutions, e-commerce websites or online services in order to conduct fraudulent activities including illegally money remittance and purchasing services or products unlawfully.

Proxies Servers

To understand how the fraudster and scammers disguise themselves behind proxy servers, the description of HTTP Proxy Servers need to be defined clearly. HTTP Proxy Servers can be split into two main categories: Transparent and Anonymous Proxy Servers.

Transparent: A Transparent Proxy Server reveals the IP address of the client's computer to the remote server. This type of servers provides no privacy to users.

Anonymous: An Anonymous Proxy Server prevents the remote servers from disclosing the identity of the client computer.

Anonymous Proxy Servers can further be broken down into two more categories, Elite or High Anonymity and Disguised Proxy Servers.

Elite: A Disguised Proxy Server gives the remote server enough information to let it know that it is a Proxy Server; however it still does not reveal the real IP address of the client's computer it is relaying information for. An Elite Proxy Server (Anonymizer) is not identifiable to the remote server as a Proxy Server in any ways, and it simply masks the HTTP request header information of the client's computer and makes it appear that the proxy server is the client.

HTTP Proxy Servers are often abused by online users who conduct illicit activities online due to their nature of configurations. Users can change their browsers' network configurations using SOCKS 4/5 settings manually in order to make their own DNS requests and hide themselves behind the Proxy Servers to access the target websites.

The purpose of this service is to reveal the real IP addresses of users who use Elite Proxy Servers, and ultimately to identify a perpetrator of a fraudulent activity.