Browsed by
Category: Uncategorized

Should we be honoring clientHolds for certain Registrars?

Should we be honoring clientHolds for certain Registrars?

We’ve become aware that the domain suspension system is being gamed. Once we become aware that a malicious domain is targeting consumers, we list it in our database. We also have some free sub-domains and free URLs to content, but this discussion doesn’t include them. Up until now, we’ll submit reports to certain registrars who would suspend them. Likewise certain Registries monitor our database and upon a listing by us would investigate and suspend these domains. These Registrars and Registries…

Read More Read More

Advance Fee Fraud: Content Issues or DNS Abuse?

Advance Fee Fraud: Content Issues or DNS Abuse?

All to often we see people that should know better, claiming that Advance Fee Fraud (AFF) is purely content issues. A while back a senior person at a company offering security services, which includes email filtering, expressed his surprise that AFF uses bespoke domains to defraud. More recently a community member of ICANN denied that domains and DNS abuse is seen in consumer facing threats. When he was shown such, he was surprised. What is DNS? DNS is an abbreviation…

Read More Read More

Three vehicle scams, a warning in a GDPR WHOIS future

Three vehicle scams, a warning in a GDPR WHOIS future

The worlds leading and biggest registrar, GoDaddy, has adopted the attitude that the registrant name, phone number and email address is private information, much in line with the proposed ICANN WHOIS changes to meet the requirements of the upcoming GDPR the end of this month (May, 2018). These changes by Godaddy has left various commercial and governmental players dissatisfied, leading to a complaint to ICANN via Mr Brian Winterfeldt (Winterfeldt IP Group, PLLLC): https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/correspondence/winterfeldt-to-chalaby-et-al-10mar18-en.pdf ICANN is still stalling on this…

Read More Read More

The Roman Bathhouse Babies

The Roman Bathhouse Babies

What rights do you have as an ordinary internet consumer? To best answer this, let’s first look at a recent discovery more than a 100 baby skeletons in a Roman bathhouse sewer: The discovery of a mass baby grave under Roman bathhouse in Ashkelon, Israel Along the shores of Israel’s Mediterranean coast, in the ancient seaport of Ashkelon, archaeologist Ross Voss made a gruesome find. While exploring one of the city’s sewers, he discovered a large number of small bones….

Read More Read More

Looking back at 2017

Looking back at 2017

2017 was a disastrous year for the consumer in the cyber fraud arena and we saw a lot happening. It’s all to easy looking at numbers such as our 2017 statistics, not realizing what they represent. This period was a virtual war where consumers lost their livelihoods after being defrauded, the numbers represent futures lost, the undermining of one of the marvels of the 21st century, the internet. Behind each increase in count, we find misery multiplied. These are directly…

Read More Read More

The Faker Maker

The Faker Maker

The role of the Faker Maker in 419 frauds is not generally known. Yet he is key to the long-term success of a scam. This term, although the origins of it have been lost, is used to describe somebody knowingly facilitating 419 frauds from a technical perspective for personal gain in exchange for the risk of doing so. He is a technical specialist services provider to parties involved in 419 fraud and knowingly and willingly facilitating. It’s not uncommon to…

Read More Read More

We don’t accept these email domain endings

We don’t accept these email domain endings

On the 1st of November 2017, Artists Against 419 blocked emails email addresses using the following top level domains to our mail services: .accountant .bid .cricket .date .download .faith .loan .men .party .racing .review .science .stream .trade .webcam .win This step was most regrettable, but we reserve the right to stop any serial abuse of our email services and resources. Suddenly today we saw a massive spam inflow from at least two of these TLDs. The patterns were all too…

Read More Read More

Understanding the Cameroonian Pet Scam

Understanding the Cameroonian Pet Scam

In a previous article we mentioned that not much is known about the Cameroonian Pet Scam or this type of fraud emanating from West Africa. We mentioned the pet scam, the weed scam and stolen credit card details. This article quickly looks at one scammer found that will illustrate this type of cyber-crime.