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The short tale of an online scam

duarteocarmo.com

41–50 of 98 posts

Re: The short tale of an online scam

#41
post #4
post #3

Namecheap. Surprise. They seem to be the preferred DNS provider for this sort of thing.

In what world can a DNS provider verify every single domain purchaser’s intent and activities post-sale? I don’t understand your argument at all…

It's not that sales slip through, it's that they refuse takedowns even when provided with legal cases and police reports against dead obvious scam sites.

Re: The short tale of an online scam

#42
>This little script would send him about 5000 different combinations of the above parameters in a completely random fashion.

More work, but with potential to waste more of the scammer’s time, would be to fake up requests corrupted in a way that suggests your browser config exposes some subtle bug, say a race condition, in his scripts. Might keep him busy for days …

Re: The short tale of an online scam

#44

The only odd thing I noticed was around 4000 requests were sent in perhaps a short time. That would indeed tip off the scammer. Might've been better to send in two or three a day, and ramp it up slowly until you get caught.

I thought so as well, but if they generated a new url per each victim, storing the referrer could make it trivial to filter out...

Re: The short tale of an online scam

#45
Since most card transactions these days require strong authentication and this is done in Denmark via NemId, which requires second factor (either an app or a key card sent to individual's officially registered address), I wonder what their game plan is. They could use up all your codes and steal the key card from your mailbox, but otherwise I'm not sure... Maybe they wanted victims to pay for 'shipping' the item, but AFAIK NemId asks you to confirm a specific payment amount, so seems it would be quite small amount of money.

That being said, I fell for another shipping scam in DK, seems it's quite common these days. Bank cancelled the card and transactions easily, though.

Re: The short tale of an online scam

#46
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of scams want your bank details. Unlike with SMS 2FA where the phone company never offered their service as a magic universal authenticator, the scammers want your bank account because it's a bank account. To the extent such scams work, we should be pretty unequivocal that it is your bank's fault. Banks are always reluctant to put their hands in their pockets when it comes to meaningful security. Whereas merchan…

> My good bank actually has security. Would you be willing to make a recommendation?

First Direct

However I live in the United Kingdom, so this recommendation won't be much use to people who live elsewhere. My recommendation certainly does not stretch to their parent, HSBC, once the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation which likely does operate other banks where you live.

Re: The short tale of an online scam

#48

The only odd thing I noticed was around 4000 requests were sent in perhaps a short time. That would indeed tip off the scammer. Might've been better to send in two or three a day, and ramp it up slowly until you get caught.

I thought so as well, but if they generated a new url per each victim, storing the referrer could make it trivial to filter out...

Also, more simply perhaps, if the OP was using Python, their User-Agent would indicate it, and that too could be filtered out easily. I'd have at least taken the small additional step of using a real User-Agent cloned from their actual browser.

Re: The short tale of an online scam

#49
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've written a little bit about why NameCheap is so beloved by scammers. See https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/05/why-do-scammers-love-namech... They allow anonymous payments and they're slow to respond to takedown requests. They've started monitoring registrations now - so you can't register domains like `hsbc-co-uk.biz` without going through some extra checks.

>They allow anonymous payments and they're slow to respond to takedown requests. things that might also be liked by non-scammers.

Non-scammers is a pretty broad set of people, most of whom are not interested in that. Who specifically do you have in mind?

Re: The short tale of an online scam

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the justifications is that showing only the hostname will make it easier to recognize malicious hostnames; as it is, the typical non-technical user just sees a bunch of stuff, doesn't really know how to distinguish hostname from path. I buy it honestly.

how they suppose to learn about it or at least be curious about it if they do not even see it? >I buy it honestly. phishing should look nice to the victim?

In the case of OP, what the user would see in the bar would be 'delivery-85367.icu' which looks very suspicious.
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