Finding Spammers

I regularly get email from people who are looking for spammers. They've lost money and want to get it back, or they want to find out if a given company is reputable. Let me cover a few things:

• I have no association with any company or individual listed here. I cannot tell you if a given company is reputable or not. "Reputable" implies that there's an existing reputation, built up from past experience, and I certainly don't carry on business with companies that spam. How long has the company been around? A whois search at www.whois.org can tell you when they created that domain; is it within the last year? Worse yet, in the last few months? The only thing I can say about a given domain is that they have sent me spam in the past.
• I have no ability to shut down a domain or web site that's currently live. I also have no ability to bring back a web site that the spammer has shut down; your best bet here is probably to do a Google search for words likely to be on their pages and click on the "Cached" link.
• If you have been defrauded, please contact any and all of the following: your local law enforcement, your state's Attorney General, the FBI, the Better Businesss Bureau, and your bank or other credit-card issuing organization.
• If you need contact information for a web site that is no longer active, go to www.whois.org and try entering the domain name in one of their search boxes.
• If you want to shut down a spammer, complain to their ISP. Send the entire email you recieved, headers and all (these are very important), and send the mail to the Spammer's ISP.