Info: Israeli Brokerage Services scammers change tactics
One of the ways to block spam fairly reliably is to block on the basis of the links contained in the spam. In reaction to this, apparently, the Israeli Brokerage Services scammers have mostly stopped linking the images in their spam to their websites. Instead, they have been opting for shorter domain names and instructing the recipient to type the address by hand, as shown in the sample spam image here. Because the text appears in a GIF image, the recipient can't even copy and paste the address.
As an aside, if their primary motivation here is to dodge spam filters, it's not working very well. There are a lot other characteristics of their spams which identify them as such.
5 comments:
Just an FYI, but I wrote to the registrar of two of Israeli Brokerage Services domains on the 19th. The websites are: http://israelibrokeragelimiredservices.com and http://ibltd.org. Anyway, it took a few days, but the registrar did kill both websites.
I commend you on your efforts, but that delay of "a few days" is still a workable window of opportunity for them. I've seen fifteen different "Israeli Brokerage" domain names used in the last twenty days, and I've given up on reporting them to slow-footed registrars.
Make that sixteen domains. Now they are using "isbro.net". It's like playing whack-a-mole, isn't it?
I would think that since all of the domains are registered with the same registrar that it has the capabilities of searching its database for all registrations with the name "Israeli Brokerage Services", and should be able to suspend all of the names that we haven't located at once. All of the domains I have found were registered during the first week of October.
Also, I noticed that when I did a "whois" search that all of the servers are different. I was told that these scam artists are hosting them all on their own servers so we can't even complain to the hosts.
I was thinking about emailing John Stossel on 20/20 - he does a piece called "Give Me a Break". Maybe that will at least help.
The email messages are driving me nuts. No way to block them.
Do you think it might be worth an email message to internic to complain about the registrar?
Good news! The Hong Kong registrar took down 5 the Israeli Brokerage Services domains today. At least this registrar reacts quicker than register.com does. Granted I don't know if this registrar reacted to my email message or email messages from others that are frustrated with these scammers. Either way, I'm just happy that the domains are dead.
As far as I know there is only one domain that is still up through registrar.com, and I reported it on Friday, so I expect that it will be down by the end of the week.
And, I only received one email message today for IBS, and it was from a dead domain.
I hope I am frustrating the hell out of these scammers by reporting them. Too bad there isn't one national registry to report these fraudulent domains to that all registrars could access.
Post a Comment