Web Hosting and Fraud – How to Safeguard Your Business

Posted on April 1st, 2010
A blog post by DN (1 Comment)

The web hosting industry is often the target of fraudsters around the world in a variety of ways. Instead of scamming people by stealing their financial information like most scam artists, web hosting scammers will actually pose as real companies, gaining the trust of the victim before making the final move to steal their funds and possibly tarnish their reputations as well. Without knowing the ins and outs of the web hosting industry it can be very difficult to counteract such an attack, especially if you are dealing with a web hosting company that does not take the proper precautions to protect you form such risks.

Email Fraud

The main method used by scam artists to defraud web hosting account holders is email “marketing.” Many times the scam artist may even send you an email posing to be your current web hosting company, and convince you to sign up for additional services. They may even tell you that your hosting account is about to expire and that you need to renew your plan immediately before all of your sites are taken offline. Regardless of which method they use there is usually an urgent call to action that prompts the web hosting account holder to take immediate action. Sometimes they may not even want your money, they may be looking for a way to steal your web domains by gaining access to your hosting account’s login credentials. Once the perpetrator is logged into your account they can transfer domain ownership to themselves, and it would be very difficult to prove that you did not take this action yourself.

How do they Get Away With It?

The short answer to this question is – they don’t. In the long run they will almost all be caught and shut down, however they can and do get away with a lot of money before they are caught. Once you have given them your credit card they can use it for whatever they’d like until you decide to deactivate your card. To keep something like this from happening to you, you’ll need to make sure you only deal with reputable hosting company that safeguards their email file transfer protocol correctly.

Verifying Email Origins

While this may seem obvious to most people, all of this fraud usually happens because people fail to check the origin of the email messages from their hosting company. The scam artists are smart enough to completely clone the template of a hosting company’s email and then send it to you posing as the company itself. The quickest and easiest way to stop this from happening to you is to check the originating email address of the sender. If the address is different form the one that you usually receive emails form your hosting company at, then it may be a fraud attempt.

Conclusion

Aside from taking precautions yourself,  make sure you have advanced security notifications in place with your web hosting company. Tell your web hosting company that you would like to be notified via phone every time a change is made to your account.