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May 03, 2005

How frustrating! I get a Southtrust Bank phish that points to a newly minted domain (yesterday) that I see is hosted at charter.com. So, following my usual operating procedure, I wanted to alert charter about the site so they can shut it down. I've had a fair amount of success at this recently.

Visiting charter.com's Web site, I look for the Contact or Customer Support page. They'd be glad to hear from me...as long as I am a charter.com customer. Following several paths through the Customer Help menu, I'm always led to the login page. I can't find a way to get past the login page to make my report. If I'm not a customer, they simply don't want to hear from me, even if the place was on fire.

Okay. The fallback position is to send a report to abuse@charter.com. This address is reported in the whois database as the official abuse address for the outfit. Off goes my message.

A moment later, the message bounces with an error that says abuse@charter.com is an unknown address. Aaargh!

When no one can tell you there's a problem, there must not be any problems. To charter.com I say, Way to put your head in the sand...or some other dark place.