Bad Boys of the Internet

The Global Anti Scam Alliance and Scamadviser analyzed 12.3 million domain names and discovered that some Internet Service Providers and countries seem to support scammers much more than others.

Of the domains analyzed, the 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 three times more likely to come across an online scam. 

Bad Registrars

Every website ever created has a domain name, and these domain names can only be acquired through domain registrars. 

GoDaddy is the world's largest domain registrar and increased its share of hosting dubious domains from 3% last year to this year's 7.5%. This, however, is still slightly less than the overall average.

What's alarming is the high percentage rate of low-score domains registered on Alibaba. Alibaba has a huge 63.8% of domains with low scores and is the highest among the top registrars. Likewise, American-based companies like NameSilo (28.2%) and NameCheap (14.8%) also do not score well.

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 have a low Trust Score. 

Among the biggest hosters, Namecheap has the most substandard performance. Of its 340,095 websites analyzed, 22.95% have a Trust Score lower than 20. Bodis and Sedo have the best performance with only 2% and 2.3% scammy websites. 

Bad Registries

Registries are the actual owner of extensions such as .com, .uk and .shop. 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. 

Five 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.

Bad Countries

The United States hosts a massive total of 6.7 million websites, of which 9% are considered low-score, which is slightly above the overall percentage. 

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%.

How to Fix the Internet?

This year's data shows a 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, law enforcement, and Internet Service Providers to define concrete actions to combat online fraud more effectively and efficiently.