My buddy just got ripped off by some guy. He ws buying a transmission for his 300zx. But, isnt there a way to track people down. I mean, if you have some kind of Ip address, cant you find that computer, or the network which it logs onto the internet with? He has emails from the guy, and a forum where the guy was posting, both places to get Ips from i believe. Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

Damn....

You can ask the forum admin to give you his IP's.
Then you can lookup to who that IP belongs (ISP)
Try sending the e-mail to support@that_ISP.com with a threat to possible get his records through court (if they dont want to help you from the start).

Check email source, look for ip's and mail servers. maybe he is using his own mail server....

You just have to be creative with this stuff...

Me and my friend nailed a kid that tried to scam us by faking PayPal payments. He got grounded by his dad, who was a sysadmin for their ISP

Just having his IP is not enough, many scammers will bounce through open proxies that have no logging (75% of cable modem subnets are infected with trojans/viruses that run open proxies among other things). Its a start, but to catch him, you will have to dupe him into providing something real, usually a pobox, or an address (which sometimes is not theirs), and then let law enforcement handle it. People in general do not have the resources to track down scammers easily. I know, I am a network security engineer, and I have to deal with this shit daily.

By the way ( this comes from FBI agent that helped us on ocasion) - if you have $5000 in loss or damages from this transaction, you can report the fraud to FBI and they should be able to help you.

Thanks for the input guys, apreciate it!

try this it might give you some info. might not http://sunny.nic.com/cgi-bin/whois