So you’ve stumbled upon a bogus website and it is obvious that the site is fraudulent. You want to report the site so that no unsuspecting person becomes the next victim, but how do you go about this? This article will give you all the information you need to instigate a takedown get a fake website removed.

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You have the site address – now what?

Scammers don’t actually give you a great deal to go on unless you know what you are looking for. You could try searching the site for an address but this location is likely to be bogus also, so you would be wasting your time. What you need to do is find out a bit more about how the web site is hosted. Thankfully this is easy enough to do.

You will need to visit a WhoIs site on the Internet. There are many to choose from but my favourite is the offering from DomainTools . I find this to be the most in-depth although most will give you similar information.

Running a search will give you lots of useful information that you can use to report the fake website. Hopefully this will result in the fake website being removed.

The registrar, NameCheap, is clearly shown in this screenshot. There is also an email address where you can report abuse. This is a great place to start. Sometimes the registrar will not be the host but they will help you out in tracking down the host if you need to.

The domain name registration date is also useful to check. A lot of scammers will tell you that their site is between 3 and 5 years old as part of the scam but we can see this one is a little over a year old. In reality, this is quite an old scam site. To avoid detection most sites will scam a few victims and then disappear. They will then be resurrected under a slightly different name.

Another useful piece of information here is the IP address of the site. If you are having no luck identifying who the host is, the IP address is like gold dust. You can enter this (or domain name too) into a site such as WhoIsHostingThis to be told who the host is. You can then contact them and demand that they take action.

An alternative to Whois

If you are really struggling with using the WhoIs information, a simple way to find the IP address of a site it to ping it. To do this, type cmd and return from your computer’s run box. The just type ping websitename and press return. The website’s IP address will be shown.

Using ping to find the bogus site’s IP address

Contact methods for the most popular hosts that scammers have used in our experience can be found here .

Justifying the removal

When you report a fake website, no web host is going to remove a site just because you tell them to. You are going to have to come up with some solid proof that the site is fraudulent. In most cases, the hosts have been very sympathetic and in agreement with our justifications. From a business point of view, they don’t want illegal sites on their platform.

Take screenshots of things that don’t seem right. From a computer, you can use the in-built Snipping Tool if you are using a Windows PC. When attaching these to your email, make sure you are describing what is wrong with the image. This will ensure a speedy and hopefully successful response from the host. Justification reasons for the main sites I’ve dealt with can be found here.

Sample of an email I sent to a web host to justify the removal of a scam site

If at first you don’t succeed …..

Not all web hosts are going to agree with you at the first time of asking. In this scenario, you need to be persistent. Keep gathering evidence and if possible, try and engage in the online chat with the scammer. These make for great screenshots when they trip themselves up. Take these screenshots regularly though as they do have a tendency to block the chat on a regular basis. The more information you can provide, the more chance you have of getting the fake website removed.

After you have taken a site down

The first time I took a site down I was over the moon. Imagine my disappointment though when the next day it was back online again. This was very disheartening and my first thought was to blame the web host, only it isn’t their fault. The scammer had simply moved to a new host however. As their domain name is registered to them, they can use it on any host they like.

This is so frustrating as it means we have to go through the whole process of shutting them down again. Starting with WhoIs, we will now need to find the identity of the new host and convince them that we are telling the truth.

This is where we need help. The more people who can be on the lookout for these sites re-spawning the better. The aim is to make it an inconvenience for the scammer to operate and hopefully cost them financially at the same time as they will have to subscribe to each new host they join.

We are never going to close all these scam sites down but for every one we do, we potentially save several people from being the next victim. That has to be worth an hour of your time doesn’t it?

Remove the site from Google

If you are unable to convince a web host to remove the site, all is not lost. You can help steer traffic away from the fake site by reporting it to Google. Google’s content removal tool will allow you to request content is removed from any of the Google products including the search. Follow the wizard, ensuring you are giving as much information as you can. The more information you provide, the better chance there is of getting the site removed.