Ask HN: How best to take down China-based WFH scam impersonating businesses?

3 points

3 years ago

Our company was recently involved in what we believe is a very large work-from-home Tether scam. The basic setup of the scam is:

1. Scammer sets up a fraudulent site with branding/domain name similar to an established company.

Examples: https://adverityuk.com, https://applifyrevue.com

2. These sites are used to recruit victims for a work-from-home scam and ultimately involve them buying/transferring Tether.

3. The legitimate company receives complaints when the victim tries to complain or get their money back ultimately damaging the brand/business of the company.

We're unsure of the scope of this scam but we believe it's very large as we interviewed victims that lost from USD$15-50K. You can see a warning about this scam at: https://fenzodigital.com/.

Many of the scam sites have a reverse IP of 20.232.140.198 and you can see a small sample of the +1000 domains we're aware of at: https://pastebin.com/1tbqtfPi.

We believe the host resolves to a CDN based in China (https://www.dnsqx.com/gfcdn.html) that is hosted on Azure.

We've:

* Contacted the Registrar (Name.com) but they basically said we need to contact the host or work through ICANN.

* Submitted a complaint to the domain registrant through Name.com (no response yet)

* Submitted a complaint to Azure (no response yet)

* Tried contacting the CDN through Telegram (no response yet)

Are there any other suggestions for bringing down this scam ASAP?