I just received the following email:
This was strange since I’ve never heard of this company, and my email address ends in .edu, so it is clearly college related and isn’t similar to any of the net biz contacts at all. Apparently this site allows people to use their bank account to hold money before it’s transferred to another person outside of the country. Would a company really give people $150 just to receive cash and send it to another person? Why?
Thinly-disguised spam, for a common cheque cashing scam.
A fraudulent cheque is deposited to the suckers account – legally, the bank has to release the funds in seven days (or is it five?) Since the culprit is in Russia, it takes longer before the fraud is confirmed. Meanwhile, theyve sent the lion’s share of the cash on to the scammer.
It’s a variant of this scam.
Yeah, any site that asks for your bank account information and doesn’t even bother to get a token SSL certificate should raise some alarms.
Wow, I’ve never heard of that scam before. Thanks for the info.
I did a little whois research as well. On their front page, they have dates of when things have happened:
05.04.2004
From now, each 10th member will receive +50$ over!!!
04.17.2004
Our e-mail operators Victoria and Natasha Litz are back from 2 month vacations. From now members’ support is performed by 5 operators
02.12.2004
We have simplified registration process. No documents mailing needed now!
30.11.2003
The number of our members has reached 500. Congratulations to Sara Harlington. She will get additional $100 for her first transaction.
but if one looks at the domain registration, the domain wasn’t even registered until 5/31/2004:
Registrant:
Vitalij Egorov asegorov@front.ru +7.44123131
Vitalij Egorov
1 maya
Krasnoyarsk,Krasnoyarsk,RU 13123131
Domain Name:netbizproxy.com
Record last updated at 2004-05-31 16:46:03
Record created on 2004/5/31
Record expired on 2005/5/31
Sounds like a scam to me.
I agree that this is a scam, and I consider the record creation date suspicious, but in the interest of fairness to people you may investigate in the future, you should be aware that this can also happen if you change domain registrars (e.g. when you renew your domain, you may choose to do this through a different domain registration agent, especially if your original was a “full service” registrar or agent. Once you’re familiar with the system, you may choose a much cheaper discount registrar, a registrar with better services or options, etc.)
My oldest domain goes back to the days when registration was free. Starting ca. 1994-5, it was $100/2years via Network Solutions, the sole registrar at the time. Then the alternative registrars came along, and I now pay something like $6-7/yr for each domain. I’d have switched anyway, because every dealing I had with NSi (except for their cashing my checks) took months of follow-up. They’d demand ID 9which they never acknowledged getting) lost their own records of various requests, or simply didn’t respond.
You might try checking the Internet Wayback Machine to see if they happened to make note of the domain’s earlier existence.