O’Neill and Brown Plumbing creates website to out impersonator as online scammer

When this plumber found a website that mimicked his business, he had a brilliant idea of ​​beating the hacker in his own game. Here is what he did.

What to do if scammers use your company data to create a fake website?

It’s a problem we see almost every day at IDCARE, Australia’s national support service for the cyber community.

Sometimes we hear from business owners being impersonated online. These owners are angry and frustrated that this is happening and there seems to be little they can do about it.

But in June we found a company that refused to give up.

Lesson one: never cross a plumber!

The company is O’Neill and Brown Plumbing of Canberra.

The company’s owner was contacted in February by a crack team of cybersecurity detectives in the Northern Territory working with the Government Consumer Affairs Bureau.

The team informed him that his company details had been used by fraudsters in creating a fake website selling agricultural and construction equipment, Pantano Equipment.

Lesson 2: NT super detectives are on the alert; especially when it comes to agricultural equipment!

We received numerous inquiries about this scam, with one person telling how they “absolutely ruined me” when they realized the website was fake and his tractor wouldn’t show up.

So what do you do when your business is copied by criminals selling things that don’t exist?

The owner of the plumbing business spoke to his IT staff and the IT staff contacted the police for advice.

He came across a really helpful member of the Australian Federal Police who encouraged him to report the copying website to the domain host.

This is the company responsible for buying and selling website domains and registering them.

It is a complex world in which “registrants” and “registrars” meet “privacy hosts”.

Everyone has a role and everyone leaves little “cyber breadcrumb marks” behind.

Some of these come to an abrupt end, while others offer a chance to widen the complainant’s reach of their ailments.

So the IT guy wrote to the site’s domain host and had some success removing it, but then it reappeared under another similar name and people were guided through searches for farm equipment on Google and marketplaces on it.

Lesson 3: When It Comes To Cyber, Hone Your Whack-a-Mole Skills.

Then there was a stroke of genius. The company bought the Australian domain name www.pantanoequipment.com.au and the sole purpose of this website was to let people know about the scam.

It lists the different websites the scammers are using and urges people to report any activity to the police.

This move beats the cheaters in their own game. In the words of our managing director here at IDCARE, Dr. David Lacey: “Sometimes to catch a rat you have to go down the gutter”.

The company’s employees have also posted reviews on the fake website highlighting that their company information is being impersonated and the website is a scam.

Lesson 4: Cyber ​​scammers only win if you don’t know what the scam is. So defeat them in their game!

While some people are still getting caught, the numbers affected by this fake website are on the decline.

Kathy Sundstrom is a former Sunshine Coast Daily journalist who now works for identity and cyber support service IDCARE.