On the 20th of Jan 2018 we sent an email to Tucows and the reseller SmarterASP on domains used for websites selling both legitimate and forged passports, visas, drivers licenses etc. They also claimed to sell forged currency. The reality is this is a well known scam used by Cameroonian fraudsters. Invariably these lead to later extortion where the fraudsters impersonate the authorities and fees/fines are payable.
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…
Sometimes we can learn a lot from what experts in their field of operation publish. Ironically we saw this yesterday again when Avast, a large anti-virus vendor, quoted an article by John Wasik on Forbes: All online scams have one thing in common: They want to tap your greed to get at personal information they can steal. These “phishing” ruses are happening 24/7. A typical banking scam will ask for information so the scammer can access anything from your credit…
ICANN had two complaints they closed, escalated back to them last week. One was a Registrar Standards complaint, one was regarding a rogue reseller proxy at the registrar which is the subject of the first complaint. Why? What happens where we have a registrar that serially accepts and has been accepting weak unverified registration details, for at least the past four years into the registries, in violation of the ICANN RAA and this leads to mass abuse? What happens if…
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…
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….
‘C’ in Accountability stands for Consumer. Remove it and all that’s left is A countability of victims. We were recently asked if https://pacecourierexpress.com/ is a legitimate website. We minutely examined it. It’s a turd!
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…
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…
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…