A Case of Stolen Identities
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If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a scammer. Last night, my friend showed me a link to an extremely interesting website — babson.me. Whether or not their product is real (I haven’t bothered trying to sign up) is irrelevant to me — the fact that they’re trying to profit off of Babson’s name and reputation annoyed me. So, inspired by this Attack Vector article, I decided to see if I could dig up the names of the people behind this.
The first step, naturally, was a Whois lookup which returned the following results:
Administrative Contact:
Quevillon, Mark info@babson.me
Babson Apps!
P.O. Box 425911
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142
United States
+1.6178121492
So we’ve now got a real name, mailing address, and phone number. A WhitePages reverse phone lookup only revealed that the phone number is a landline, but had no further details. A quick Google search for Mark, however, got me his LinkedIn profile:
The HUTV website lists the same mailing address as babson.me, so I felt pretty confident that I was on the right track here. What interested me more at this point was the 501(c)(3) claim. A search of the IRS website returned no results for a non-profit named “HUTV,” so I was beginning to suspect that the entire thing was fraudulent. However, I wasn’t done searching yet.
I did a reverse Whois lookup on the DomainTools site for info@hutv.org, and found that it’s currently associated with 8 different domains. Not wanting to pay for a full report, I just Googled that email address and found HomeUniversity.org, with the following footer: “Copyright 2011 Home University | a public 501(c)(3) non-profit.” I went back to the IRS website and found that sure enough, there’s a non-profit called Home University Television Inc. listed as a Massachusetts non-profit. The MA Secretary of State’s website gave me the following information:
I also hit a treasure trove of personal information:
I figured that this was a home address, and White Pages confirmed it for me, along with a phone number:
I could keep going with this search, and look up property records and other information, but I’m content with this. It’s possible at this point to give this family a call to ask why they’re impersonating Babson, but I probably won’t do that. However, I may shoot an email to Kimbia, which is the company that’s accepting donations on their behalf :-D