How to Report Scam Sites and Domains
If you use social media, I’m sure you’ve seen A LOT scam ads claiming that various celebrities have some amazing revelation or that the Government wants to stop them giving away some amazing secret to making money…
Clicking on the scam ads normally takes you to a fake news site (often on a very odd looking domain), with a link to an investment scam site.
Being a geek(!) I do a bit of (simple) detective work and then report the scam domains. I’ve lost count of the number of domains I’ve had closed. They keep on coming, but if I can get a site shut down before someone falls for the scams, I feel I’ve done something…
How to Know Where to Report Scams
The first thing to do is to find out where the domain used in the scam was registered and where the scam site is hosted. You can do this using a WHOIS search.
I use the WHOIS search from whois.com (https://www.whois.com/whois/). It tells you the basic information about the company used to register the domain (the Registrar) and gives you the ‘Nameservers’ of the domain (where the main part of the domain settings point).
I report the domain to the Registrar and sometimes the company where the Nameservers are pointed.
(Sometimes the link on social media will also be to a link shortener, like bitly, which you can also report.)
Links to Report Domains to Registrars & Nameserver Companies
As I report A LOT of scam domains (often multiple a day), I use a separate email account just for reporting scams. You don’t need to, it just saves my email account getting loads of email updates from the companies I report things to!
Some companies have forms on their sites and others have email addresses. Some also ask for screenshots (this is a good guide on taking screenshots across a range of platforms).
The links below are in no particular order – apart from I’ve seen way more scam domains registered with PDR than anywhere else…
- Public Domain Registrar (PDR) – [email protected] (A popular registrar with scammers. They often take scam domains down in about 48 hours.)
- Namecheap – [email protected]
- NameSilo – https://www.namesilo.com/phishing-report or [email protected]
- Bit.ly (domain shortener) – https://bitly.com/pages/trust/report-abuse
- s.id (domain shortener) – https://home.s.id/en/page/report
- Cloudflare – https://abuse.cloudflare.com/phishing (Cloudflare offers a great service – I use them – as to many scammers…)
- Tucows Domains – https://tucowsdomains.com/abuse-form/phishing/
- GoDaddy – https://supportcenter.godaddy.com/abusereport/create-new-claim?plid=1
- Dreamhost – [email protected]
- Hostinger – https://www.hostinger.com/report-abuse
- Porkbun – https://abuse.cleandns.space/porkbun
- WebNIC – [email protected]
- Dynadot – https://www.dynadot.com/report-abuse
- Liquid Web / Nexcess – https://www.liquidweb.com/policies/complaints-and-community-guidelines/
- Gname – https://www.gname.com/abuse
- Newfold (the parent company of many large brands including HostGator, Bluehost, NetworkSolution, Web.com, FastDomain, Crazy Domains, FatCow & Domain.com) – https://www.newfold.com/abuse
- OwnRegistrar – https://ownregistrar.com/handling-procedure/
- One.com – [email protected]
- 123-Reg – https://supportcenter.123-reg.co.uk/abusereport
I know there are many more domain registrars out there, those are the ones I’ve reported to the most!
Other places you can report Phishing/Scam sites
You can also report scams to the following websites. These help search engines and browsers know about dodgy sites. You might have seen a red ‘the site is deceptive’ type of screen. These sites help with that…
- https://safebrowsing.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/
- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/support/report-unsafe-site
- https://phishing.eset.com/en-us/report
Some Words for Community Notes
If you’re on X (still Twitter to me!), you can also leave Community Notes of scam posts/ads. Here are some words you can use!
This is a ‘celeb bait’ scam ad using a fake image and caption as clickbait for engagement which is against the X terms of service.
https://business.x.com/en/help/ads-policies/ads-content-policies/deceptive-and-fraudulent-contentIt goes to a fake News site leading to an investment scam. It’s similar to these scam ads: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/05/sponsored-twitter-post-goes-forex-trading-with-fake-bbc-site
Reporting Other Types of Scams and Spam
You might have guessed that I also report other scams and spam, which often come via email.
Doing that uses some of the tools above, but also some other detective skills to know where emails were sent from, etc. But that would need a whole other post…!