Help! I've been scammed. Is it possible to trace a computer via the MAC address??

[theNEOone]

I "sold" my MBP this weekend to someone who turned out to be a scammer. He paid me $1250 for my MBP, of which $600 (all in one hundred dollar bills) was counterfeit. I'm still in a little bit of shock - the kid seemed legit. Very nice, talkative, etc. I even held up the bills to the light to make sure the watermark was present on the bills - it was. (My bank later told me that it was a really good counterfeit....didn't really make me feel any better.)

In any case, I have the MAC address of my notebook. Is it possible to trace it??? Am I screwed? I'm not even upset about the missing $600 - I'm more upset that this shaddy guy could potentially get away with this and continue scamming other people, who possibly might be totally devastated if they were scammed out of that kind of money....


=|

 

[Modelworks]

In short there is no way to trace it via MAC. If you knew more about the networks he uses or internet providers then maybe , and that would require their help. I might would file a report with the treasury department , there is links on their site. At least that way if he is known or becomes known in the future you might have some recourse.

Be careful with $100 bills right now. The treasury is releasing a new $100 bill this month and that means counterfeiters are going to try to unload the old ones.

 

[Emulex]

i told a guy to buy me a money order (craigslist) instead of giving me cash. he said no. i said f'off. sadly the world is full of scammers (Even here).

I'd have taken a pic of his license plate.

 

[Warez King]

Still have the bills? Buy an item for near $100, each at a different store. Return the items a week later to their respective stores and receive legit cash in the refund. If they're "really good counterfeits" as said by the bank, it'll probably fool Floe at Walmart.





Nice first post. How 'bout you go peddle your fraudulent BS anywhere else but here.

Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.


esquared
Anandtech Administrator

 

[Fardringle]

Still have the bills? Buy an item for near $100, each at a different store. Return the items a week later to their respective stores and receive legit cash in the refund. If they're "really good counterfeits" as said by the bank, it'll probably fool Floe at Walmart.

I guess this shouldn't be surprising considering your user name, but are you actually suggesting that the OP commit a felony?

 

[theNEOone]

I guess this shouldn't be surprising considering your user name, but are you actually suggesting that the OP commit a felony?

Yah - not really sure what he was thinking...


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[buzzsaw13]

Have you contacted apple? You might be able to get apple to have the macbook reported as stolen.

 

[Glob]

MAC addresses are all unique (unless spoofed), so the potential is there, I just don't know about having every ISP in North America search for it showing up on their networks, and he's behind a router, you're really out of luck. Couldn't hurt to task the police with this matter, and see what they say.

Also, I wouldn't necessarily think he's the one doing the counterfeiting. Maybe he was issued the bills somewhere else.

 

[alkemyst]

Mac Addresses aren't unique. It's not totally uncommon in huge rollouts to have two devices share the same MAC, hence why almost all modern devices allow the user to reassign a MAC.

 

[MJinZ]

You should turn it over the Feds or locals and try to get the person who counterfeited the money.

 

[Glob]

Mac Addresses aren't unique. It's not totally uncommon in huge rollouts to have two devices share the same MAC, hence why almost all modern devices allow the user to reassign a MAC.

They once were, has that changed?

 

[alkemyst]

MACs were never billed as unique unless back in the old Class A, B, C days. They need to be unique to exist on the same network.

 

[Glob]

I'm gonna need to see some kind of reference on this from you, because it's been common knowledge up to this point that all hardware MACs are unique.

 

[drebo]

MAC addresses are all unique (unless spoofed), so the potential is there, I just don't know about having every ISP in North America search for it showing up on their networks, and he's behind a router, you're really out of luck. Couldn't hurt to task the police with this matter, and see what they say.

Also, I wouldn't necessarily think he's the one doing the counterfeiting. Maybe he was issued the bills somewhere else.

The ISP will likely never see the MAC. MAC addresses are layer 2. If you connect through a router, the upstream devices will never see the MAC address. Any layer 3 boundary, in fact, will prevent the ISP from seeing the MAC, which means that it's unlikely they'd ever see it.

 

[drebo]

I'm gonna need to see some kind of reference on this from you, because it's been common knowledge up to this point that all hardware MACs are unique.

MAC addresses are not unique. They don't need to be.

Do you really think that a 48 bit number is enough to uniquely identify every single Ethernet interface ever made? I tend to think that more than 281,474,976,710,656 interfaces have been manufactured.

MAC addresses only need to be unique in so far as being unique on a single layer 2 broadcast domain. Outside of that, you could have two identical MACs one hop away from each other and there wouldn't be a problem.

 

[alkemyst]

I'm gonna need to see some kind of reference on this from you, because it's been common knowledge up to this point that all hardware MACs are unique.

Drebo should have explained enough, but between myself and a handful of engineers I know it's come up more than a half dozen times.

You may want to look into getting network certified if you are this questioning on others who are.

A simple Google search would have shown you I was right.

 

[Glob]

Ok, in reference to your first reply, I did state that if the counterfeiter was behind a router, obviously the MAC would be stripped and replaced by the router before forwarding the packet on, and thus would never be seen by an ISP.

Secondly, the last time I went through a CCNA course (2001?), MACs were still globally unique (UNLESS SPOOFED).

And yes, I believe nearly 300 trillion unique MACs is probably adequate for the world's devices. The world's population is currently 6,697,254,041. In order to saturate the address space MAC addressing offers, everyone in the world would have to own over 42 THOUSAND addressed devices.

 

[Modelworks]

MAC addresses are not unique. They don't need to be.

Do you really think that a 48 bit number is enough to uniquely identify every single Ethernet interface ever made? I tend to think that more than 281,474,976,710,656 interfaces have been manufactured.

MAC addresses are registered to the company that uses them and are unique. Using just anything will get you in trouble with the IEEE and there is no need to. We are not even close to running out of numbers.

You can look up devices by MAC here:
http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/index.shtml

For example I use the first three of my mac 00-1D-7D and it returns

00-1D-7D (hex) GIGA-BYTE TECHNOLOGY CO.,LTD.
001D7D (base 16) GIGA-BYTE TECHNOLOGY CO.,LTD.
Pin-Jen City, Taoyuan,
Pin-Jen Taoyuan 324
TAIWAN, REPUBLIC OF CHINA

The motherboard is a gigabyte board.

The three-octet OUI can be used to generate Universal LAN MAC addresses and Protocol Identifiers per ANSI/IEEE Std 802 for use in Local and Metropolitan Area Network applications.

If your firm manufactures or plans to manufacture products using ISO/IEC 8802 standards, you should apply to IEEE for your firm's OUI. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. has been designated by the ISO Council to act as the registration authority for the implementation of International Standards in the ISO/IEC 8802 series. This is the one world-wide source of registered OUIs. For further details contact:
IEEE Registration Authority
IEEE Standards Department
445 Hoes Lane
Piscataway NJ 08854
Phone: (732) 465-6481
Fax: (732) 562-1571
Email: IEEE Registration Authority

 

[Glob]

Drebo should have explained enough, but between myself and a handful of engineers I know it's come up more than a half dozen times.

You may want to look into getting network certified if you are this questioning on others who are.

A simple Google search would have shown you I was right.

Ah, the anonymity of the Internet strikes again.

I'm a network engineer with over a decade of experience. Anyway, I guess, enjoy checking the MAC addresses for every device you add to your networks so as to avoid any duplicates in your L2 broadcast domains.

 

[alkemyst]

Umm you don't have to check them, they will let you know.

Over a decade experience and haven't heard this happening...interesting.

 

[Glob]

I'm going to see how far you will dig your own hole.

What will let you know?

 

[drebo]

I'm a network engineer with over a decade of experience.

And yet you think that an ISP has a way of determining the MACs of all devices sending traffic over it?

:|

 

[Glob]

I guess you aren't reading anything but the first sentence of my posts, so I'll just stop here.

 

[ViviTheMage]

Do you have the serial number for the laptop still?

 

[airdata]

Do you have the serial number for the laptop still?

Police report filed yet? I'm assuming they called the police when you presented the fake bills at the bank?