Success story – Scam Detectives shuts down fake charity website

Apr 13, 2010 by admin    15 Comments    Posted under: Charity Scams

We reported last week about a fake charity website that had been set up to steal donations intended for children in Haiti. You can read the report Here.

We’re pleased to report that the site has now been shut down and we’d like to thank our friends at Privacy Protect and UK2 for their help and support in achieving this great result.

How did we do it?

After we’d proven that the website was fake, we checked the whois data for the website and found that it was protected by “Whois Privacy”, a service which (whilst having genuine uses) is often used by scammers to hide fake registration details and slow down investigations into the origins of their scam websites. A quick report to Privacy Protect was enough to remove this privacy, as the website was clearly in breach of their terms and conditions forbidding unlawful activity.

Once the whois privacy was lifted, we were able to ascertain two key points:

  1. That the sponsoring registrar for the domain was UK2.net
  2. That the whois details were false, in violation of ICANN regulations

This enabled us to submit abuse reports to both ICANN and UK2.net asking them to intervene and shut down the website.

We’d like to thank the abuse teams at PrivacyProtect, ICANN and UK2 Group for their swift action in processing our report and getting the site shut down.

A drop in the ocean

Unfortunately, this is only one of many websites that solicit donations to fake charities. We can’t shut them all down (much as we’d love to) because of the time and effort that it takes to find, investigate and report them. We are looking for corporate sponsors for Scam Detectives to help us fund our work.

If you’d like to help, please contact us via Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/scam_detectives) or by email at charles(at)scam-detectives(dot)co(dot)uk

Thanks again to everyone who helped to get this vile site shut down.

Tags: , , ,

15 Comments + Add Comment

Got anything to say? Go ahead and leave a comment!

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Scam Detectives is having a facelift

We know that you've found this page in Google, on Facebook or on Twitter, so we've left it here for you to find. However, we're in the middle of a facelift and so not all of the usual Scam Detectives functionality is here just now. Please bear with us, normal service will be resumed shortly...

Recent Posts

Categories