3% of All Internet Sites Are Scams

How some Internet companies are fighting back online fraud successfully

AMSTERDAM,May 12,2021 --Scamadviseranalyzed 7 million domain names and discovered that 3% of all websites have a Trust Score lower than 20 out of 100,meaning that they are (very) likely to be a scam.

The company also discovered that some Internet companies do a much better job at preventing scammers from accessing their services than others.

Good Registrars

The percentage of Low Score Domainsdiffers strongly per registrar (where you register a domain name). Companies like Network Solutions and 1&! IONOS are able to keep the number of possible scam sites below 1%,while others have more than three to four times the industry average.

Registrar

Hosted Domains

Low Score Domains

% Low Score Domains

Network Solutions

82,531

532

0.60%

1&1 IONOS

49,002

483

1.00%

FastDomain

33,624

552

1.60%

ENOM

91,405

1,650

1.80%

GoDaddy.com

528,752

15,876

3.00%

PublicDomainRegistry.com

92,461

3,074

3.30%

GMO INTERNET,INC.

29,825

1,039

3.50%

NameCheap

119,754

12,546

10.50%

NameSilo

40,710

5,340

13.20%

Alibaba Cloud Computing

35,925

5,139

14.30%

Good Hosting Companies

Website hosting companies like Google and GoDaddy perform remarkably well with only 1.7% and 2.0% of the websites researched being considered malicious. Far below the industry average of 3%

ISP

Hosted Domains

Low Score Domains

% Low Score Domains

Google

175,561

2,975

1.70%

WebsiteWelcome.com

64,214

1,140

1.80%

GoDaddy.com

105,755

2,127

2.00%

Unified Layer

68,850

1,334

2.00%

OVH

78,024

1,690

2.20%

Hetzner Online

52,249

1,204

2.30%

DigitalOcean

60,215

1,459

2.40%

Cloudflare

326,325

11,905

3.70%

Amazon Technologies

75,150

3,372

4.50%

Shopify

45,407

3,802

8.40%

Namecheap

48,116

8,456

17.60%

Good Registries

The registry owns the top-level domain such as .com,.biz or .store.The Chinese .cntop-level domain seems hardly misused (0.36%) at all. The .co extension,on the other hand,is often misused (5.4%) by scammers as it gives potential scam victims the impression that it is a legit .com site.

Registry

Hosted Domains

Low Score Domains

% Low Score Domains

cn

72,014

190

0.36%

au

30,503

366

1.20%

nl

52,255

699

1.30%

it

31,259

467

1.50%

pl

25,431

392

1.50%

org

105,805

1,753

1.70%

de

82,464

1,552

1.80%

co.uk

58,587

1,839

3.10%

net

135,170

4,317

3.20%

com

1,832,842

72,243

3.90%

ru

78,952

3,457

4.40%

co

25,342

5.40%

How to Make the Internet Safer?

Clearly,some Internet companies are much better at keeping scam sites at bay than others. The trick seems to be fair pricing and well-structured Know Your Customer (KYC) processes.

The companies struggling the most with a high number of scammy domains seem to be price fighters. For example,some registrars sell domains with the extension .ltd as little as $6.98,.top for $3.98 and .store for $1.88 per year!

Several hosting providers,registries,and registrars have improved their KYC policies with remarkable results. The Danish .dk registry for example was able to reduce the number of online stores selling fakes by 80% in one year by just asking for an ID.

Contact: Jorij.Abraham@EcommerceFoundation.org. Download full report.