I got a Crypto scam site shut down!

A couple days ago I made this post about a Crypto scam I'd found on reddit.

This phishing scam involved bots who contact people posting in cryptocurrency forums and supply them with a link to a phishing site claiming it will fix their problem. The eventual goal is to have the victim input their seed phrase or private key.

Despite this being a fairly obvious scam it's always the most vulnerable that fall for it and I found myself pretty annoyed there wasn't much I could do to stop it from happening. I'd reported it to google Safe Browsing but after a day I found the site was still accessible with no problem, so I decided to channel my inner Jim Browning and do a little research.

I took the websites IP and did a search of public DNS records, through this I was able to find the domain registrar that the site was hosted with, NameCheap based in the US. I also had a look through their HTML and found the very first line indicated the site was copied using a tool from a previous website that had already been banned by Chrome.

So I visited NameCheap and reached out to their support staff detailing the site and my evidence against it. Today they got back to me, confirming the site violated their policy and it was immediately taken offline!

I know this is a small victory but it feels awesome to know that you managed to have an entire scam site taken offline and that this will disrupt who ever is responsible at least for some period of time.

Feel free to do the same if you find something like that, despite making me feel like Neo it really wasn't that difficult and the more people that do it the larger the impact.