Does Reporting Make A Difference

Last week after looking into some scams reported by the Guild of Guardians community on the official Discord I did some digging and identified 27 domains hosting a fake cryptocurrency exchange mimicking MECX Global.  I reported the fake sites to:

  • Reg[.]ru: the domain registar
  • Digital Ocean: the webhosting provider
  • MECX Global: the site being impersonated
A week later I decided to check the status of the sites.  I found the following:

  • 8 sites appear to have been taken down
  • 1 site was unresponsive
  • 1 site had a Metamask warning
  • 17 sites remain active
I was really happy to see at least one of the sites was flagged by Metamask, and that also directed me to one of my new favorite sites:  https://cryptoscamdb.org


It's not great to see that 17 sites remain active, and here is a list of all of the sites current states as of this posting:

  • bin-core[.]com: Active
  • bit-camp[.]com: Down
  • bit-cron[.]com: Down
  • bit-ext[.]com: Down
  • bit-green[.]com: Down
  • bit-investor[.]com: Down
  • bit-thor[.]com: Active
  • camp-bit[.]com: Active
  • camp-token[.]com: Active
  • chain-bit[.]com: Active
  • coin-bin[.]com: Active
  • cron-bit[.]com: Active
  • crypto-floor[.]com: Active
  • ext-bit[.]com: Active
  • first-token[.]com: Active
  • flow-bit[.]com: Down
  • link-token[.]com: Metamask warning
  • market-token[.]com: Unresponsive
  • more-bit[.]com: Active
  • set-bit[.]com: Active
  • temp-bit[.]com: Active
  • token-club[.]com: Active
  • token-next[.]com: Active
  • token-smart[.]com: Active
  • vrytex[.]com: Down
  • wall-bit[.]com: Down
I'm not giving up though, and if the registrar, the hosting provider and the cryptocurrency exchange can't get these sites taken down it might be time to try Crytoscamdb.  Today I'll add all the above hosts to cryptoscamdb and see if maybe we start getting Metamask warnings for each of them.

I'll check back in a few days and see if it got us anywhere.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Down MetaMask Impersonation Rabbit Hole

Image
It's Friday night.  I should be doing something else.  I have a VR headset literally two feet away from me collecting dust, and what I am I doing?  I'm scouring the internet for more sites that have implemented a specific MetaMask impersonation technique. I created a short video demonstrating the technique, and if you're curious you can check it out here: https://youtu.be/OJu9HlJ2wsc At first it was just a few Guild of Guardians sites that I found and managed to get taken down, but shortly after I decided to leverage dnstwist to find some additional look-a-like domains, and after adding the tld swap option I uncovered even more. I noticed a pattern though, two IP addresses kept coming up in connection with this particular MetaMask impersonation: 5.61.58.93 and  45.136.50.34 If you want to know what all is hosted on a particular server you can leverage tools like VirusTotal.  In some cases you'll come across IP addresses used by shared hosting providers, in other words y
Read more

NameSilo Abuse Reporting

Image
On Sunday I sent a message to NameSilo (abuse@namesilo.com) regarding the following token scam websites: guildofguardianes[.]com guildofguardians[.]net guildofguardian[.]net guildofguardians[.]cc It's hard to predict the response for any given domain registrar.  Some are really responsive, but in my experience if you want to get something done quickly you need some kind of pre-existing relationship with the registrar in question.  This is where companies like Phishlabs (https://www.phishlabs.com/) shine with their brand protection services as they automate the process of requesting takedowns for their clients and invest in maintaining strong relationships with registrars. As an independent researcher, my success with getting sites taken down varies. In this case I received an automated response directing me to their "Report Phishing Form" hosted at https://new.namesilo.com/phishing_report. I can only imagine the volume of phishing reports this registrar gets, and there
Read more

More Sites Taken Down

 Last week I received responses from NameSilo confirming they took action on the following domains: zerions[.]info zerions[.]com guildofguardians[.]org guildsofguardians[.]me guildofguardians[.]top I'm very impressed with NameSilo's response time, they've been very cooperative.  If anyone from NameSilo happens to read this article, thank you so much! I still have several domains to work my way through hosted on the same servers.  It's easy to drown in the amount of scams around crypto, so I try to focus on Guild of Guardians related scams, but it's difficult to leave the others hanging.  I'm hoping to get through reporting the rest of the domains soon. A bit of a short update, but it's been a bit of a crazy week last week.  Will write up a more comprehensive update this week. Stay safe out there, and if you see anything suspicious you can always reach me @gogscamtracker on Twitter or email report@gogscamtracker.com.
Read more