The Detectives

The fraudulent online escrow detectives have seen this all before, and many, many times. They recognize the templates; they recognize the words.

And so they should, because those words are normally stolen from their own sites—these private eyes are normally employed by the bona fide escrow companies to search out, track and close down as many fraudulent sites as possible.

The Hunt

I asked one of these detectives, Brandon Abbey of Escrow.com, how they find out about the fraudulent sites.

"There are a couple of ways we hunt down the fraud sites," he said.

"Quite often someone calls our customer support department to inquire about a particular site. In this case, the site is reviewed and if fraudulent a notice is sent to the hosting company.

"The note to the hosting company is a request for them to review the site giving consideration to their Terms of Service (TOS) and Acceptable Use Policy (AUP), and it usually results in the takedown of the site.

"Some hosting companies, however, take the stance that they are not responsible for the content on their servers regardless of what it is. There are specific laws that address certain things like child pornography but nothing we can point to regarding the escrow fraud."

What if nobody calls you? I wondered. How do you track them down?

"Often we Google a word-string (phrases) taken from our own site, and you’d be surprised how often we get hits. This means we’ve found a fraudulent site which came to us for the copy.

"Now, when we find a fraudulent copy of our site we can send a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notification to the ISP and that usually works.

"The main problem is that the ISPs are afraid of someone suing them for shutting down a site. The reality is no one has ever been sued by a Romanian scammer.

"We have also built a library of templates, which we can track down; as well as a library of phrases that we Google.

"On a good day (or bad day, depending on viewpoint) some of these searches will come return over a hundred matches. We then inspect each site to see if it is legitimate. If suspicions we forward the notice to the hosting company asking for a TOS and AUP review.

"As you can imagine some hosting companies are better than others. Generally, hosting companies in the US are very responsive.

"Xinnet, on the other hand, a hosting company in China, has supported some of the scam sites for months at a time."

Valuable Advice

How can, I wondered, the average Internet user protect him- or herself against online escrow fraud?

"Of course," said my detective, "it is important that people do research on these site before ever sending money or merchandise. In fact, I suggest doing a WHOIS search on the domain. This way you can discover how long the site has been up, where it is being hosted, how many times the site has been taken down. These are clues.

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