8.3% of All Websites are Scams: How Big Internet Companies are Supporting Scammers

The Global Anti Scam Alliance and ScamAdviser analyzed 12.3 million domain names and discovered that some hosting companies, registrars (where you register a domain name), registries (the owners of extensions such as .com, .biz and .store) and countries seem to support scammers much more than others (see “About the Data” at the end of this article for more information).

Of the 12.3 million domains analyzed, the overall percentage of websites having a low Trust Score (below 20 on a scale from 1 to 100) has increased from last year’s 3% to this year’s 8.3%. This means you are almost 3 times more likely to come across an online scam this year than last.

Bad Registrars

Every website ever created has a domain name, and these domain names can only be acquired through domain registrars. Purchasing from them does not give you the ownership of the domain name, rather, you are only leasing it for the year you selected.

GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain registrar, and in line with the overall increase of low Trust Score websites, it also increased its share from hosting 3% last year to this year’s 7.5%. This, however, is still slightly less than the overall average and also below average of the largest 20 registrars by number of hosted domains.

Registrar	Hosted Domains	Low Score Domains	% Low Score Domains
GoDaddy.com, LLC	17,38,572	1,29,482	7.45%
NAMECHEAP INC	9,88,533	1,46,472	14.82%
PDR Ltd. d/b/a PublicDomainRegistry.com	3,44,767	28,749	8.34%
NameSilo, LLC	3,25,851	91,742	28.16%
ABOVE.COM PTY LTD.	2,03,141	6,982	3.44%
Hosting Concepts B.V. d/b/a Registrar.eu	1,63,929	23,920	14.59%
Network Solutions, LLC	1,55,651	469	0.30%
ENOM, INC.	1,36,609	3,994	2.92%
Name.com, Inc.	1,29,939	16,784	12.92%
Google LLC	1,24,278	5,125	4.12%
Hostinger, UAB	1,14,585	14,040	12.25%
DYNADOT, LLC	1,12,921	5,256	4.66%
MarkMonitor, Inc.	1,09,412	8,739	7.99%
Wix.Com Ltd.	1,04,081	953	0.92%
GMO INTERNET, INC.	95,904	8,849	9.23%
Dynadot LLC	94,440	9,710	10.28%
Key-Systems GmbH	91,647	4,631	5.05%
Alibaba Cloud Computing Ltd. d/b/a HiChina (www.net.cn)	91,598	58,393	63.75%
REGRU-RU	81,469	6,531	8.02%
Alibaba Cloud Computing (Beijing) Co., Ltd.	73,429	8,518	11.60%

What’s alarming from the table above is the high percentage rate of low-score domains registered on Alibaba. Alibaba Cloud Computing Ltd has a huge 63.8% domains with low scores and is the highest among the top registrars by number of low scoring hosted domains. Collectively, Alibaba’s different entities will rank the 5th largest registrar by hosted domains but still remain first in hosting low-score domains among the largest 20.

Registrar	Hosted Domains	Low Score Domains	% Low Score Domains
Alibaba Cloud Computing Ltd. d/b/a HiChina (www.net.cn)	91,598	58,393	63.75%
Alibaba Cloud Computing (Beijing) Co., Ltd.	73,429	8,518	11.60%
ALIBABA.COM SINGAPORE E-COMMERCE PRIVATE LIMITED	59,267	18,764	31.66%
Alibaba Cloud Computing Ltd.	18,473	9,478	51.31%
Total	2,42,767	95,153	39.20%

This may be due to the very high internet traffic just from the Chinese market alone affected by the undelivered or fake products originating from Mainland China. Likewise, American based companies like NameSilo (28.2%) and NameCheap (14.8%) also do not score well.

If we look at the registrars with the lowest average Trust Score, not surprisingly, we will find several repeaters in Shanghai Meicheng, and smaller NameSilo LLC entities. Shanghai Meicheng has a disproportionate number of hosted domains for its very low average Trust Score of 1.3, meanwhile several smaller NameSilo LLC entities appear considering that a NameSilo entity exists as the 4th largest albeit 2nd worst registrar of the 20 largest registrars.

Registrar	Average Score	Domains hosted
shanghai meicheng technology information development co ltd	1	4,209
NameSilo,LLC	4	29
FE-SU	6	46
22net,Inc.	6	345
Hong Kong Juming Network Technology Co. , Ltd	7	6
CHENGDU WEST DIMENSION DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY CO., LTD.	8	6
Xiamen Nawang Technology Co., Ltd	8	2,596
Namesilo, LLC	11	10

 

Bad Hosting Companies

To enable businesses to make their websites accessible to the internet, an Internet Service Provider (ISP) is needed. This year’s largest “hosting” company is CloudFlare with over 2.9 million websites but 7.7% of those having a low Trust Score[1]. Despite this being lower than the overall average, CloudFlare has doubled last year’s ratio of 3.7%.

Nevertheless, among the companies from the top 10 highest hosted domains, Namecheap still has the most substandard performance. Of its 340,095 websites analyzed, 22.95% have a Trust Score lower than 20. This is a 30% increase than last year’s already 17.6%. On the other hand, Bodis and Sedo have the best performance with only 2% and 2.3% scammy websites.

ISP	Hosted Domains	Low Score Domains	% Low Score Domains
CloudFlare Inc.	29,79,942	2,29,755	7.71%
Shopify Inc.	6,39,126	38,757	6.06%
Google LLC	5,84,301	21,443	3.67%
Amazon Technologies Inc.	3,46,704	25,352	7.31%
Namecheap Inc.	3,40,095	78,048	22.95%
Amazon.com Inc.	3,28,771	13,755	4.18%
Bodis LLC	3,27,239	6,514	1.99%
Sedo GmbH	2,71,089	6,156	2.27%
GoDaddy.com LLC	2,48,054	10,105	4.07%
Hostinger International Limited	2,33,349	22,867	9.80%

The table below shows the 10 companies with the lowest average score but without the reach of the largest companies above. However, looking a little down the line at the 18th position it is notable that Saibo Hongkong Co. Limited is the worst performer with an above average hosted reach, but having only an average Trust Score of 5 for its 12,532 websites hosted.

ISP	Average Score	Domains hosted
YunDC	1	75
Veraton Projects Ltd.	1	10
Sistema Internet Services Limited	1	8
Tong Yuan	1	235
Bingchang Zhou	1	285
RoyaleHosting BV	1	41
Hostus Lon01 Net	3	434
Viter Evgeniy Vasilevich	3	36
Kaifeng Guochao E-Commerce Co.Ltd.	4	1,152
ServeByte Ltd	4	44
Saibo Hongkong Co. Limited	5	11,963

 

Bad Registries

To register a domain, you need to work with registrars that sell domain names to the public. The registrars then work with registries to acquire available domain names for individuals and companies to use. The registry manages the data for the specific domain endings under its authority.

Everyone’s favorite “.com” extension is still the most used with 6.2 million websites but 9.2% of them have low scores of less than 20. This is more than a twofold increase in last year’s result and slightly above the overall percentage.

However, 5 more registries stand out, and not in a positive way. The registries are: 1) “.xyz”, 2) “.shop”, 3) “.top”, 4) “.site” and 5) “.online”. “.top” takes home the lead with a whopping 42% of low Trust Score domains. This means that out of the 137,133 domains hosted, there is almost half the chance that they are malicious.

Registry	Hosted Domains	Low Score Domains	% Low Score Domains
com	62,45,515	5,74,014	9.19%
net	4,08,721	22,104	5.41%
org	3,28,350	12,930	3.94%
xyz	2,45,759	57,357	23.34%
tk	2,43,274	2,741	1.13%
co.uk	2,25,008	2,574	1.14%
cn	2,13,081	2,834	1.33%
ru	1,94,183	15,012	7.73%
de	1,72,590	750	0.44%
shop	1,59,106	46,661	29.33%
com.au	1,51,730	212	0.14%
com.br	1,47,860	3,434	2.32%
top	1,37,133	57,584	41.99%
in	1,20,458	7,215	5.99%
co	1,15,210	7,698	6.68%
nl	1,12,290	763	0.68%
online	1,06,888	26,016	24.34%
info	91,758	11,302	12.32%
site	88,791	23,210	26.14%
cf	85,249	3,265	3.83%

Given the rate of its total domains vs. the count of the low score domains, it comes to no surprise that “.top” is again part of the list of lowest average score. Other notable registries are “.space” and “.fun” both hosting above average domains but having below average scores. Prices of these registries at Namecheap.com (one of the registrars with the highest hosted domains) are on sale and you can get them for less than $1.99 for a year’s registration.

Registry	Average Score	Hosted Domains
beauty	36	556
day	37	215
autos	37	207
tr	37	461
nf	39	329
quest	39	4,738
ltd	40	5,062
space	41	29,763
hair	41	421
fun	41	25,793
sbs	41	3,041
makeup	42	130
click	42	6,991
top	42	1,37,111

 

Bad Countries

As we come to the geographical location of these online entities, it should be well noted that there can be several reasons and themes as to why these countries perform poorly – from selling counterfeit items, to failure of delivery, to cryptocurrency and other financial scams.

The country that serves most websites is the United States with a massive total of 6.7 million websites, out of which 9% are considered low-score, which is slightly above the overall percentage. The United States however cannot escape the increasing trend of scammy websites, having only 3.8% last year, which is more than a twofold jump.

Overall, the countries with the highest growth of online scams seems to be Russia and Hong Kong, both with a threefold increase of low-score domains compared to last year’s data. Hong Kong however wins the highest hosted ratio of low score domains with 26%.

Country	Hosted Domains	Low Score Domains	% Low Score Domains
United States	67,60,230	6,12,291	9.06%
Germany	8,37,493	46,875	5.60%
Canada	7,48,696	47,731	6.38%
Netherlands	4,57,086	32,682	7.15%
Singapore	3,44,059	28,317	8.23%
United Kingdom	2,82,021	14,868	5.27%
Hong Kong	2,73,324	71,127	26.02%
Columbia	2,39,345	13,867	5.79%
France	2,03,107	13,935	6.86%
Russian Federation	1,84,682	29,628	16.04%

If you look at the countries which, on average, have the lowest Trust Scores, you would see the majority are classified by the IMF as developing countries[2]. With this observation, Luxembourg stands out as a developed country hosting the lowest average score of 30. This may have been brought about the boom in cryptocurrency and other online investments fraud attempts[3].

More notable countries on the lower score spectrum can be seen at 14th Hong Kong , 20th Finland, 23rd Singapore, 26th Canada, and 29th Russia. These countries are host to around 1.6 million websites between them but none of them have an average score of above 70. In contrast, the overall average is 85, while each country hosts an average of only 57 thousand websites.

Country	Average Score	Domains hosted
Belize	29	4,603
Luxembourg	30	8,130
Seychelles	31	929
Guadeloupe	31	15
Ecuador	34	286
Panama	35	1,251
Nicaragua	36	142
Guatemala	37	139
Senegal	43	46
Honduras	45	243
Hong Kong	53	2,73,423
Finland	64	40,814
Singapore	66	3,44,009
Canada	67	7,48,616
Russian Federation (the)	70	1,84,681

 

How to Fix the Internet?

Untrusty websites are now creeping into previously trusty entities, showing that fraudsters worldwide are becoming bolder, better, and, very likely, richer. This year’s data shows the clear increase in untrustworthy websites, making everyone three times more likely to be scammed than last year.

To find answers, GASA is organizing the Global Anti Scam Summit bringing together governments, consumer & financial authorities, law enforcement, Internet Service Providers, and cybersecurity organizations to share knowledge and insights on fighting online scams and define concrete actions to combat online fraud more effectively and efficiently.

About the Data

More than 4 million consumers check ScamAdviser every month and add more than 1 million new websites to its database. Since 2012, ScamAdviser has been developing an algorithm which gives every domain a Trust Score based on 40 different data sources.

ScamAdviser does not crawl the entire web. The data analysis is based on 12.3 million domains scanned at the request of consumers or businesses from August 1, 2021 to July 31, 2022.  A domain with a Trust Score of 100 is very, very likely legit. A domain that scores a 1 is very, very likely a scam. The overall average Trust Score of the covered data is 85 and with 8.3% of all sites have Trust Scores less than 20.

[1] Cloudflare is actually not so much a hosting provider but a content delivery network and DDoS mitigation company. It primarily acts as a reverse proxy between a website's visitor and the Cloudflare customer's hosting provider. As a result, it “sits” between the end-user and the actual hosting company.
[2] https://www.worlddata.info/developing-countries.php
[3] https://cecluxembourg.lu/subjects/fraud/?lang=en

 

The data analysis was done by Arthur.