This is a simple entry about finding out who a person is that owns an email. This will talk about harassing emails however, it can cover other subjects such as skip tracing.

Visit Western States Investigations for more information.

By the way, there are a ton of private investigators that won't be happy with this blog post. Don't get ripped off by a PI that tells you they can trace an email back to an owner. These cases are much more than tracing an email and  I would always suggest hiring a PI in these cases regardless of what you think you can accomplish. You can't match the investigative resources, training and experience a professional private investigator has. See the rest of the blog entry to understand why you should look at the whole of the situation and not just hiring a PI that tells you he can find the owner by tracing an IP address.

The phone call usually comes in that someone is sending harassing emails and the potential client wants to find out who they are. Often the potential client is excited because they have the "email header".

What is an email header?
An email header is the portion of the email that is normally unseen when you create an email. The function is to give the parameters, rules and instructions for the server to identify the email and how to handle it. While it is true there is useful information in the header, many times it is only going to point you back to the server owner, not the email address owner.
    
    Go to the following https://www.arin.net/ and enter 204.30.67.75 in the box in the upper right corner of the page to see the results you get from pulling an IP address out of an email header.

You can see that the information may be so general it won't help you at all. Sometimes it can be helpful as it will point you to the owner of a small company or site. That would really narrow down the possibilities of who the email could be coming from.

Who owns an email address?
Good question isn't it? Take a moment and think about the amount of email addresses you have. I think about it and know that I have about 10. I don't use them all, but I can tell you that NONE of them have personal information associated with them. When I say personal information I mean when I set them up I didn't put in my favorite color, address, names of my dogs and the rest that some people do. Why? Well isn't security an issue on the internet? You will find that on many of the providers you can set-up any email you want under any name you want. Depending on the provider you will not have to put in much personal information. When you sign up for Yahoo emails they ask for a secondary email however the privacy acts and their own policies prohibit the secondary email from being openly associated with the Yahoo email address in public.
    Where people go wrong with privacy and email is when they use the email on everything they sign up for, mainly social networking sites. Put my email jt@wsillp.com into a Google search bar and see what you come up with. I personally only associate that email with sites or things that are related to my business. I would NEVER use that email address on a personal nature.

By the way you can do a basic search for someones email by doing what I had you do with mine. In the internet world if a person used an email address for something on the net, you will typically find many things related to that email and potentially find something out about that person.

How do I get the actual owner of an email?
Get a warrant! The Electronic Communications Privacy Act does not allow for the average person or PI to get records of who a person is from a provider. It allows law enforcement to get the records with a warrant. You will need a criminal investigation in order to get a warrant and that means law enforcement is investigating the circumstances which I will tell you is EXTREMELY RARE!

Hire a professional private investigator to do the work for you. As stated above you can not match the investigative resources, training and experience a professional private investigator has. I personally have done tons of these cases. Most of our local law enforcement agencies will tell the person to hire a PI to start getting information about the case then present it to them when some facts or evidence have been discovered. 

    Look at some of the things I do:

1. I have databases that contain millions of records of people that you will never get access to unless you hire a private investigator. On some cases I simply put an email address into the database and found the owner within a matter of seconds.
2. I will do a professional private investigation. Although these cases are not easy, they are able to be successfully investigated. They take time and a lot of investigative work (one main reason the police won't take them on). Many times the clues are hidden in the emails. If you are not a professional investigator you probably won't know what a clue is or is not. I have successfully solved cases based on clues within the emails themselves. Quite frankly the harasser is normally below average intelligence and makes mistakes that we can use in the emails. Let's face it; adults confront a person face to face, a harasser is so STUPID they think being anonymous is key to the success of their harassment. For them it is fun, but the reality is they don't have the guts to face you in person.

There are many investigative tools and ways to find out who this person is. I only named a couple and simply cannot tell you everything we do because then the harassers or what I consider wimps of the world will know what we do. I can safely say to 100% certainty that you or someone close to you knows who this harasser is! Why would someone that has no connection to you want to harass you? Why would someone want to harass you and they have no personal gain? Begin by looking around you, then call us and we will give you a FREE consultation on what we can do for your case.

Visit www.wsillp.com to see the services we provide.