KAZEY JOURNAL

7/1/2005

Tackling Fraudulent Clients

Filed under: Business — @ 9:02 pm

When it comes to having fraudulent web hosting clients, it really becomes very irritating when someone host a bank’s website with you and tells you that, his company that supposedly designed it, is not fraudulent, and they had nothing to do with it. Therefore you shouldn’t disgrace them in front of their clients and that you should go ahead and unsuspended the account. Well they are quiet bold and funny this days.

Fraudulent web hosting clients I have had so far are in the Logistics, bank, and lottery category. I guess that’s more of the aspects these fraudsters are interested in, probably more profitable and convincing. My mail server was even once victimized by a careless reseller, when he accessed his web hosting admin in his supposedly friends notebook.

The new trend now is, they don’t use free email services anymore, since that has been one of the ways in detecting whether an offer is fraudulent or not. And they love UK addresses. I really don’t know why?

The funny thing about a recent client i had an argument with, was that, he did not read my TOS, and argued that I never had them, and probably I was fraudulent. Perhaps he didn’t understand the simple English. That was stated in Nairahost.com website that it does not support nor even host fraudulent websites.

Illegal Activities: Nairahost’s services may not be used for illegal purposes, or in support of illegal activities. Nairahost reserves the right to cooperate with legal authorities and/or injured third parties in the investigation of any suspected crime or civil wrongdoing.

In fact to make it easy on my part, I take it as an obligation to forward any suspected sites of my clients for special analysis to 419 Legal. It is an anti-fraud “police” site wholly owned and managed by the Johannesburg Commercial Branch of the South African Police Services, and so far they have done a good job.

An example of their review of a recent suspected domain I hosted which was http://alliancebonds.net, was really intriguing.

Their review is as follows

THIS SITE IS FRAUDULENT FOR THE FOLLOWING REASONS:

This “bank” claims to be located in the UK - financial institutions in
this country are regulated by the Financial Services Authority. This
“bank” does not appear on their list of legitimate banks.

The address is a rented office, several companies have this address and it
is likely to be an industrial estate – certainly not the premises of a
bank.

They ask for personal information to be submitted on a non-secure page.

This “bank” has no internet presence beyond their main site, and the
domain registration is recent but makes claims to be well established.

PLEASE TAKE THE FOLLOWING ACTION RIGHT AWAY:

Shut down all email accounts and web pages associated with this site, and
hold a copy for the authorities.

Redirect all traffic for this domain to the following page, to inform
potential visitors of the dangers of advance fee fraud:

http://www.secretservice.gov/alert419.shtml

Check for other sites/domains established by this customer: fake sites
tend to be created by a small number of people.

Contact the police with any credit card and contact information you have
on record: fraudulent sites are often funded with stolen credit cards.

REMEMBER: THE PEOPLE BEHIND THESE SITES ARE CRIMINALS, OFTEN MEMBERS OF
INTERNATIONAL GANGS. DO NOT REVEAL PERSONAL INFORMATION TO THEM EXCEPT
WHEN
ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.

I am sending a copy of this message to sp(at)419legal.org (www.419legal.org
is the website of the South African Police Service and was set up to
counter all forms of Internet fraud) who retain copies of all such abuse
letters, along with sufficient header information to allow them to be used
as evidence of the date of this notification.

I am also forwarding this information to cp(at)interpol.int for their
investigative purposes.

Help us stamp out 419 scams – shut down this website! For more information
on internet fraud, please visit:

http://www.secretservice.gov/alert419.shtml
http://www.419legal.org
http://www.aa419.org

Thank you for your time. If you need more information before you can
proceed with closing this domain, please contact me.

Impressive right? Well that’s the only way to help me quickly make good decisions in relations to fraudulent web hosting clients.

So far so good, and I hope you help me too, when you detect that a website with a Nairahost whois is fraudulent in nature, please contact me immediately at support (at) nairahost.com. I would be really grateful.

5 Comments »

  1. Well Said mate.. this whole fraud thing is getting on my nerves… it’s giving everyone one of us a bad name to the international market.

    what you talked about is hosting. how about domain name registration.. we are approached by people to register a domain name for them.. which we do inocently only to discover that domain name was used for a fraudulent site… and when the whois is run on that domain we the registrant appear… which is freakin crazy. what do we do… cos they dont even register names that tells its a bank or lottery or courier site that is gonna be using the domain.

    do we now ask for proof of what the domain is gonna serve and all that stuff?...

    GOD HELP US

    Comment by vSylva — 7/2/2005 @ 4:00 pm

  2. Well in terms of domains, i wouldnt mind , i would just immediately contact the web hosting company that is hosting and if they dont take any drastic step, i would change the whois information.

    I can even go ahead to totally delete the nameserver configuration, if the web hosting is not taking actions, and i know that a lot of fraudulent activities is going on with that specific domain name.

    For domain, there is really no need for asking. Names can sometimes be really deceiving. One of the instances i recently had was citi-international.com that claims to be affiliated with citi community bank or so. All i did was terminate the account which i unfortunately hosted.

    Well we do have a long way to go in terms of eradicating fraud in that country.

    Comment by kayode muyibi — 7/2/2005 @ 4:26 pm

  3. We face same problem here.

    People buy a 5mb shared hosting plan with an innocent sounding domain name and then claim to be a leading UK bank!

    Recently we had a Multi Technology Base PLC (telling us they were an IT firm) register a domain name m-tbplc.com, and take up a 5mb account. Sounds innocent.

    I check days later and they are now a bank online!

    Here’s how we deal with it:
    1. immediate suspension
    2. request for business registration documents and authorization to carry on financiaal services
    3. after a few days to weeks we backup the files on the account for record purposes and terminate the thing
    4. now we are making arrangements to file Police reports through our lawyers

    With regards to domain names, we NEVER register domain names for ssites not to be hosted by us, since we use our own card for domain registration. Again, we manage/administer all domain names we register for people.

    When they request for a Registrar transfer, fine. But as long as our name, details and card are identified with that name, it stays in our control so we can take necessary action in any eventualities.

    We wren’t this smart when we first started. It took a few shock incidents to wake us up to this nasty reality.

    Comment by Yomi Adegboye — 7/3/2005 @ 12:50 pm

  4. Wow. Thats domain standard for you o. Your procedures are quiet impressive. But why should i go through all the hassles, we have other problems to deal with, besides fraud.

    I only email the fraudulent client to notify him of what we have found, and give him 6-12 hours, to prove us wrong. Then when the time expires . Termination automatically.

    Comment by kayode muyibi — 7/3/2005 @ 1:00 pm

  5. Thanks for the appreciation of 419legal’s work. We’re always trying to stay on top of webhosts that host fraudulent banks and lotteries. If you’re interested in advance warning of these fakes, we’d suggest that you keep an eye on the database of fake web sites maintained by the Artists Against 419 ( http://www.aa419.org ).
    If you’d like to work with 419legal.org in the fight against these scammers, we’d encourage you to become a member of the forum at http://www.419legal.org/index.php
    If you sign up with an email address related to your hosting company, it will allow us to verify your position as a hoster.

    Comment by mirakl — 7/29/2005 @ 4:26 pm

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