On two occasions this past year I’ve published stories here warning about the prospect that new European privacy regulations could result in more spams and scams ending up in your inbox. This post explains in a question and answer format some of the reasoning that went into that prediction, and responds to many of the criticisms leveled against it.

Before we get to the Q&A, a bit of background is in order. On May 25, 2018 the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) takes effect. The law, enacted by the European Parliament, requires companies to get affirmative consent for any personal information they collect on people within the European Union. Organizations that violate the GDPR could face fines of up to four percent of global annual revenues.

In response, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) — the nonprofit entity that manages the global domain name system — has proposed redacting key bits of personal data from WHOIS, the system for querying databases that store the registered users of domain names and blocks of Internet address ranges (IP addresses).

Under current ICANN rules, domain name registrars should collect and display a variety of data points when someone performs a WHOIS lookup on a given domain, such as the registrant’s name, address, email address and phone number. Most registrars offer a privacy protection service that shields this information from public WHOIS lookups; some registrars charge a nominal fee for this service, while others offer it for free.

But in a bid to help registrars comply with the GDPR, ICANN is moving forward on a plan to remove critical data elements from all public WHOIS records. Under the new system, registrars would collect all the same data points about their customers, yet limit how much of that information is made available via public WHOIS lookups.

The data to be redacted includes the name of the person who registered the domain, as well as their phone number, physical address and email address. The new rules would apply to all domain name registrars globally.

ICANN has proposed creating an “accreditation system” that would vet access to personal data in WHOIS records for several groups, including journalists, security researchers, and law enforcement officials, as well as intellectual property rights holders who routinely use WHOIS records to combat piracy and trademark abuse.

But at an ICANN meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico last month, ICANN representatives conceded that a proposal for how such a vetting system might work probably would not be ready until December 2018. Assuming ICANN meets that deadline, it could be many months after that before the hundreds of domain registrars around the world take steps to adopt the new measures.

In a series of posts on Twitter, I predicted that the WHOIS changes coming with GDPR will likely result in a noticeable increase in cybercrime — particularly in the form of phishing and other types of spam. In response to those tweets, several authors on Wednesday published an article for Georgia Tech’s Internet Governance Project titled, “WHOIS afraid of the dark? Truth or illusion, let’s know the difference when it comes to WHOIS.”

The following Q&A is intended to address many of the more misleading claims and assertions made in that article.

Cyber criminals don’t use their real information in WHOIS registrations, so what’s the big deal if the data currently available in WHOIS records is no longer in the public domain after May 25?

I can point to dozens of stories printed here — and probably hundreds elsewhere — that clearly demonstrate otherwise. Whether or not cyber crooks do provide their real information is beside the point. ANY information they provide — and especially information that they re-use across multiple domains and cybercrime campaigns — is invaluable to both grouping cybercriminal operations and in ultimately identifying who’s responsible for these activities.

To understand why data reuse in WHOIS records is so common among crooks, put yourself in the shoes of your average scammer or spammer — someone who has to register dozens or even hundreds or thousands of domains a week to ply their trade. Are you going to create hundreds or thousands of email addresses and fabricate as many personal details to make your WHOIS listings that much harder for researchers to track? The answer is that those who take this extraordinary step are by far and away the exception rather than the rule. Most simply reuse the same email address and phony address/phone/contact information across many domains as long as it remains profitable for them to do so.

This pattern of WHOIS data reuse doesn’t just extend across a few weeks or months. Very often, if a spammer, phisher or scammer can get away with re-using the same WHOIS details over many years without any deleterious effects to their operations, they will happily do so. Why they may do this is their own business, but nevertheless it makes WHOIS an incredibly powerful tool for tracking threat actors across multiple networks, registrars and Internet epochs.

All domain registrars offer free or a-la-carte privacy protection services that mask the personal information provided by the domain registrant. Most cybercriminals — unless they are dumb or lazy — are already taking advantage of these anyway, so it’s not clear why masking domain registration for everyone is going to change the status quo by much. 

It is true that some domain registrants do take advantage of WHOIS privacy services, but based on countless investigations I have conducted using WHOIS to uncover cybercrime businesses and operators, I’d wager that cybercrooks more often do not use these services. Not infrequently, when they do use WHOIS privacy options there are still gaps in coverage at some point in the domain’s history (such as when a registrant switches hosting providers) which are indexed by historic WHOIS records and that offer a brief window of visibility into the details behind the registration.

This is demonstrably true even for organized cybercrime groups and for nation state actors, and these are arguably some of the most sophisticated and savvy cybercriminals out there.

It’s worth adding that if so many cybercrooks seem nonchalant about adopting WHOIS privacy services it may well be because they reside in countries where the rule of law is not well-established, or their host country doesn’t particularly discourage their activities so long as they’re not violating the golden rule — namely, targeting people in their own backyard. And so they may not particularly care about covering their tracks. Or in other cases they do care, but nevertheless make mistakes or get sloppy at some point, as most cybercriminals do.

The GDPR does not apply to businesses — only to individuals — so there is no reason researchers or anyone else should be unable to find domain registration details for organizations and companies in the WHOIS database after May 25, right?

It is true that the European privacy regulations as they relate to WHOIS records do not apply to businesses registering domain names. However, the domain registrar industry — which operates on razor-thin profit margins and which has long sought to be free from any WHOIS requirements or accountability whatsoever — won’t exactly be tripping over themselves to add more complexity to their WHOIS efforts just to make a distinction between businesses and individuals.

As a result, registrars simply won’t make that distinction because there is no mandate that they must. They’ll just adopt the same WHOIS data collection and display polices across the board, regardless of whether the WHOIS details for a given domain suggest that the registrant is a business or an individual.

But the GDPR only applies to data collected about people in Europe, so why should this impact WHOIS registration details collected on people who are outside of Europe?

Again, domain registrars are the ones collecting WHOIS data, and they are most unlikely to develop WHOIS record collection and dissemination policies that seek to differentiate between entities covered by GDPR and those that may not be. Such an attempt would be fraught with legal and monetary complications that they simply will not take on voluntarily.

What’s more, the domain registrar community tends to view the public display of WHOIS data as a nuisance and a cost center. They have mainly only allowed public access to WHOIS data because ICANN’s contracts state that they should. So, from registrar community’s point of view, the less information they must make available to the public, the better.

Like it or not, the job of tracking down and bringing cybercriminals to justice falls to law enforcement agencies — not security researchers. Law enforcement agencies will still have unfettered access to full WHOIS records.

As it relates to inter-state crimes (i.e, the bulk of all Internet abuse), law enforcement — at least in the United States — is divided into two main components: The investigative side (i.e., the FBI and Secret Service) and the prosecutorial side (the state and district attorneys who actually initiate court proceedings intended to bring an accused person to justice).

Much of the legwork done to provide the evidence needed to convince prosecutors that there is even a case worth prosecuting is performed by security researchers. The reasons why this is true are too numerous to delve into here, but the safe answer is that law enforcement investigators typically are more motivated to focus on crimes for which they can readily envision someone getting prosecuted — and because very often their plate is full with far more pressing, immediate and local (physical) crimes.

Admittedly, this is a bit of a blanket statement because in many cases local, state and federal law enforcement agencies will do this often tedious legwork of cybercrime investigations on their own — provided it involves or impacts someone in their jurisdiction. But due in large part to these jurisdictional issues, politics and the need to build prosecutions around a specific locality when it comes to cybercrime cases, very often law enforcement agencies tend to miss the forest for the trees.

Who cares if security researchers will lose access to WHOIS data, anyway? To borrow an assertion from the Internet Governance article, “maybe it’s high time for security researchers and businesses that harvest personal information from WHOIS on an industrial scale to refine and remodel their research methods and business models.”

This is an alluring argument. After all, the technology and security industries claim to be based on innovation. But consider carefully how anti-virus, anti-spam or firewall technologies currently work. The unfortunate reality is that these technologies are still mostly powered by humans, and those humans rely heavily on access to key details about domain reputation and ownership history.

Those metrics for reputation weigh a host of different qualities, but a huge component of that reputation score is determining whether a given domain or Internet address has been connected to any other previous scams, spams, attacks or other badness. We can argue about whether this is the best way to measure reputation, but it doesn’t change the prospect that many of these technologies will in all likelihood perform less effectively after WHOIS records start being heavily redacted.

Don’t advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning obviate the need for researchers to have access to WHOIS data?

This sounds like a nice idea, but again it is far removed from current practice. Ask anyone who regularly uses WHOIS data to determine reputation or to track and block malicious online threats and I’ll wager you will find the answer is that these analyses are still mostly based on manual lookups and often thankless legwork. Perhaps such trendy technological buzzwords will indeed describe the standard practice of the security industry at some point in the future, but in my experience this does not accurately depict the reality today.

Okay, but Internet addresses are pretty useful tools for determining reputation. The sharing of IP addresses tied to cybercriminal operations isn’t going to be impacted by the GDPR, is it? 

That depends on the organization doing the sharing. I’ve encountered at least two cases in the past few months wherein European-based security firms have been reluctant to share Internet address information at all in response to the GDPR — based on a perceived (if not overly legalistic) interpretation that somehow this information also might be considered personally identifying data. This reluctance to share such information out of a concern that doing so might land the sharer in legal hot water can indeed have a chilling effect on the important sharing of threat intelligence across borders.

According to the Internet Governance article, “If you need to get in touch with a website’s administrator, you will be able to do so in what is a less intrusive manner of achieving this purpose: by using an anonymized email address, or webform, to reach them (The exact implementation will depend on the registry). If this change is inadequate for your ‘private detective’ activities and you require full WHOIS records, including the personal information, then you will need to declare to a domain name registry your specific need for and use of this personal information. Nominet, for instance, has said that interested parties may request the full WHOIS record (including historical data) for a specific domain and get a response within one business day for no charge.”

I’m sure this will go over tremendously with both the hacked sites used to host phishing and/or malware download pages, as well as those phished by or served with malware in the added time it will take to relay and approve said requests.

According to a Q3 2017 study (PDF) by security firm Webroot, the average lifespan of a phishing site is between four and eight hours. How is waiting 24 hours before being able to determine who owns the offending domain going to be helpful to either the hacked site or its victims? It also doesn’t seem likely that many other registrars will volunteer for this 24-hour turnaround duty — and indeed no others have publicly demonstrated any willingness to take on this added cost and hassle.

I’ve heard that ICANN is pushing for a delay in the GDPR as it relates to WHOIS records, to give the registrar community time to come up with an accreditation system that would grant vetted researchers access to WHOIS records. Why isn’t that a good middle ground?

It might be if ICANN hadn’t dragged its heels in taking GDPR seriously until perhaps the past few months. As it stands, the experts I’ve interviewed see little prospect for such a system being ironed out or in gaining necessary traction among the registrar community to accomplish this anytime soon. And most experts I’ve interviewed predict it is likely that the Internet community will still be debating about how to create such an accreditation system a year from now.

Hence, it’s not likely that WHOIS records will continue to be anywhere near as useful to researchers in a month or so than they were previously. And this reality will continue for many months to come — if indeed some kind of vetted WHOIS access system is ever envisioned and put into place.

After I registered a domain name using my real email address, I noticed that address started receiving more spam emails. Won’t hiding email addresses in WHOIS records reduce the overall amount of spam I can expect when registering a domain under my real email address?

That depends on whether you believe any of the responses to the bolded questions above. Will that address be spammed by people who try to lure you into paying them to register variations on that domain, or to entice you into purchasing low-cost Web hosting services from some random or shady company? Probably. That’s exactly what happens to almost anyone who registers a domain name that is publicly indexed in WHOIS records.

The real question is whether redacting all email addresses from WHOIS will result in overall more bad stuff entering your inbox and littering the Web, thanks to reputation-based anti-spam and anti-abuse systems failing to work as well as they did before GDPR kicks in.

It’s worth noting that ICANN created a working group to study this exact issue, which noted that “the appearance of email addresses in response to WHOIS queries is indeed a contributor to the receipt of spam, albeit just one of many.” However, the report concluded that “the Committee members involved in the WHOIS study do not believe that the WHOIS service is the dominant source of spam.”

Do you have something against people not getting spammed, or against better privacy in general? 

To the contrary, I have worked the majority of my professional career to expose those who are doing the spamming and scamming. And I can say without hesitation that an overwhelming percentage of that research has been possible thanks to data included in public WHOIS registration records.

Is the current WHOIS system outdated, antiquated and in need of an update? Perhaps. But scrapping the current system without establishing anything in between while laboring under the largely untested belief that in doing so we will achieve some kind of privacy utopia seems myopic.

If opponents of the current WHOIS system are being intellectually honest, they will make the following argument and stick to it: By restricting access to information currently available in the WHOIS system, whatever losses or negative consequences on security we may suffer as a result will be worth the cost in terms of added privacy. That’s an argument I can respect, if not agree with.

But for the most part that’s not the refrain I’m hearing. Instead, what this camp seems to be saying is if you’re not on board with the WHOIS changes that will be brought about by the GDPR, then there must be something wrong with you, and in any case here a bunch of thinly-sourced reasons why the coming changes might not be that bad.

Authorities in the U.S., U.K. and the Netherlands on Tuesday took down popular online attack-for-hire service WebStresser.org and arrested its alleged administrators. Investigators say that prior to the takedown, the service had more than 136,000 registered users and was responsible for launching somewhere between four and six million attacks over the past three years.

The action, dubbed “Operation Power Off,” targeted WebStresser.org (previously Webstresser.co), one of the most active services for launching point-and-click distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. WebStresser was one of many so-called “booter” services — virtual hired muscle that anyone can rent to knock nearly any website or Internet user offline.

“The damage of these attacks is substantial,” reads a statement from the Dutch National Police in a Reddit thread about the takedown.”Victims are out of business for a period of time, and spend money on mitigation and on (other) security measures.”

In a separate statement released this morning, Europol — the law enforcement agency of the European Union — said “further measures were taken against the top users of this marketplace in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Croatia, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and Hong Kong.” The servers powering WebStresser were located in Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, according to Europol.

The U.K.’s National Crime Agency said WebStresser could be rented for as little as $14.99, and that the service allowed people with little or no technical knowledge to launch crippling DDoS attacks around the world.

Neither the Dutch nor U.K. authorities would say who was arrested in connection with this takedown. But according to information obtained by KrebsOnSecurity, the administrator of WebStresser allegedly was a young man in Serbia named Jovan Mirkovic.

Mirkovic, who went by the hacker nickname “m1rk,” also used the alias “Mirkovik Babs” on Facebook where for years he openly discussed his role in programming and ultimately running WebStresser. The last post on Mirkovic’s Facebook page, dated April 3 (the day before the takedown), shows the young hacker sipping what appears to be liquor while bathing. Below that image are dozens of comments left in the past few hours, most of them simply, “RIP.”

Tuesday’s action against WebStresser is the latest such takedown to target both owners and customers of booter services. Many booter service operators apparently believe (or at least hide behind) a wordy “terms of service” agreement that all customers must acknowledge, under the assumption that somehow this absolves them of any sort of liability for how their customers use the service — regardless of how much hand-holding and technical support booter service administrators offer customers.

In October the FBI released an advisory warning that the use of booter services — also called “stressers” — is punishable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and may result in arrest and criminal prosecution.

In 2016, authorities in Israel arrested two 18-year-old men accused of running vDOS, until then the most popular and powerful booter service on the market. Their arrests came within hours of a story at KrebsOnSecurity that named the men and detailed how their service had been hacked.

Many in the hacker community have criticized authorities for targeting booter service administrators and users and for not pursuing what they perceive as more serious cybercriminals, noting that the vast majority of both groups are young men under the age of 21. In its Reddit thread, the Dutch Police addressed this criticism head-on, saying Dutch authorities are working on a new legal intervention called “Hack_Right,” a diversion program intended for first-time cyber offenders.

“Prevention of re-offending by offering a combination of restorative justice, training, coaching and positive alternatives is the main aim of this project,” the Dutch Police wrote. “See page 24 of the 5^th European Cyber Security Perspectives and stay tuned on our THTC twitter account #HackRight! AND we are working on a media campaign to prevent youngsters from starting to commit cyber crimes in the first place. Expect a launch soon.”

In the meantime, it’s likely we’ll sooner see the launch of yet another booter service. According to reviews and sales threads at stresserforums[dot]net — a marketplace for booter buyers and sellers — there are dozens of other booter services in operations, with new ones coming online almost every month.

MEDantex, a Kansas-based company that provides medical transcription services for hospitals, clinics and private physicians, took down its customer Web portal last week after being notified by KrebsOnSecurity that it was leaking sensitive patient medical records — apparently for thousands of physicians.

On Friday, KrebsOnSecurity learned that the portion of MEDantex’s site which was supposed to be a password-protected portal physicians could use to upload audio-recorded notes about their patients was instead completely open to the Internet.

What’s more, numerous online tools intended for use by MEDantex employees were exposed to anyone with a Web browser, including pages that allowed visitors to add or delete users, and to search for patient records by physician or patient name. No authentication was required to access any of these pages.

Several MEDantex portal pages left exposed to the Web suggest that the company recently was the victim of WhiteRose, a strain of ransomware that encrypts a victim’s files unless and until a ransom demand is paid — usually in the form of some virtual currency such as bitcoin.

Contacted by KrebsOnSecurity, MEDantex founder and chief executive Sreeram Pydah confirmed that the Wichita, Kansas based transcription firm recently rebuilt its online servers after suffering a ransomware infestation. Pydah said the MEDantex portal was taken down for nearly two weeks, and that it appears the glitch exposing patient records to the Web was somehow incorporated into that rebuild.

“There was some ransomware injection [into the site], and we rebuilt it,” Pydah said, just minutes before disabling the portal (which remains down as of this publication). “I don’t know how they left the documents in the open like that. We’re going to take the site down and try to figure out how this happened.”

It’s unclear exactly how many patient records were left exposed on MEDantex’s site. But one of the main exposed directories was named “/documents/userdoc,” and it included more than 2,300 physicians listed alphabetically by first initial and last name. Drilling down into each of these directories revealed a varying number of patient records — displayed and downloadable as Microsoft Word documents and/or raw audio files.

Although many of the exposed documents appear to be quite recent, some of the records dated as far back as 2007. It’s also unclear how long the data was accessible, but this Google cache of the MEDantex physician portal seems to indicate it was wide open on April 10, 2018.

Among the clients listed on MEDantex’s site include New York University Medical Center; San Francisco Multi-Specialty Medical Group; Jackson Hospital in Montgomery Ala.; Allen County Hospital in Iola, Kan; Green Clinic Surgical Hospital in Ruston, La.; Trillium Specialty Hospital in Mesa and Sun City, Ariz.; Cooper University Hospital in Camden, N.J.; Sunrise Medical Group in Miami; the Wichita Clinic in Wichita, Kan.; the Kansas Spine Center; the Kansas Orthopedic Center; and Foundation Surgical Hospitals nationwide. MEDantex’s site states these are just some of the healthcare organizations partnering with the company for transcription services.

Unfortunately, the incident at MEDantex is far from an anomaly. A study of data breaches released this month by Verizon Enterprise found that nearly a quarter of all breaches documented by the company in 2017 involved healthcare organizations.

Verizon says ransomware attacks account for 85 percent of all malware in healthcare breaches last year, and that healthcare is the only industry in which the threat from the inside is greater than that from outside.

“Human error is a major contributor to those stats,” the report concluded.

According to a story at BleepingComputer, a security news and help forum that specializes in covering ransomware outbreaks, WhiteRose was first spotted about a month ago. BleepingComputer founder Lawrence Abrams says it’s not clear how this ransomware is being distributed, but that reports indicate it is being manually installed by hacking into Remote Desktop services.

Fortunately for WhiteRose victims, this particular strain of ransomware is decryptable without the need to pay the ransom.

“The good news is this ransomware appears to be decryptable by Michael Gillespie,” Abrams wrote. “So if you become infected with WhiteRose, do not pay the ransom, and instead post a request for help in our WhiteRose Support & Help topic.”

Ransomware victims may also be able to find assistance in unlocking data without paying from nomoreransom.org.

KrebsOnSecurity would like to thank India-based cybersecurity startup Banbreach for the heads up about this incident.

Facebook has built some of the most advanced algorithms for tracking users, but when it comes to acting on user abuse reports about Facebook groups and content that clearly violate the company’s “community standards,” the social media giant’s technology appears to be woefully inadequate.

Last week, Facebook deleted almost 120 groups totaling more than 300,000 members. The groups were mostly closed — requiring approval from group administrators before outsiders could view the day-to-day postings of group members.

However, the titles, images and postings available on each group’s front page left little doubt about their true purpose: Selling everything from stolen credit cards, identities and hacked accounts to services that help automate things like spamming, phishing and denial-of-service attacks for hire.

To its credit, Facebook deleted the groups within just a few hours of KrebsOnSecurity sharing via email a spreadsheet detailing each group, which concluded that the average length of time the groups had been active on Facebook was two years. But I suspect that the company took this extraordinary step mainly because I informed them that I intended to write about the proliferation of cybercrime-based groups on Facebook.

That story, Deleted Facebook Cybercrime Groups had 300,000 Members, ended with a statement from Facebook promising to crack down on such activity and instructing users on how to report groups that violate it its community standards.

In short order, some of the groups I reported that were removed re-established themselves within hours of Facebook’s action. I decided instead of contacting Facebook’s public relations arm directly that I would report those resurrected groups and others using Facebook’s stated process. Roughly two days later I received a series replies saying that Facebook had reviewed my reports but that none of the groups were found to have violated its standards. Here’s a snippet from those replies:

Perhaps I should give Facebook the benefit of the doubt: Maybe my multiple reports one after the other triggered some kind of anti-abuse feature that is designed to throttle those who would seek to abuse it to get otherwise legitimate groups taken offline — much in the way that pools of automated bot accounts have been known to abuse Twitter’s reporting system to successfully sideline accounts of specific targets.

Or it could be that I simply didn’t click the proper sequence of buttons when reporting these groups. The closest match I could find in Facebook’s abuse reporting system were, “Doesn’t belong on Facebook,” and “Purchase or sale of drugs, guns or regulated products.” There was/is no option for “selling hacked accounts, credit cards and identities,” or anything of that sort.

In any case, one thing seems clear: Naming and shaming these shady Facebook groups via Twitter seems to work better right now for getting them removed from Facebook than using Facebook’s own formal abuse reporting process. So that’s what I did on Thursday. Here’s an example:

Within minutes of my tweeting about this, the group was gone. I also tweeted about “Best of the Best,” which was selling accounts from many different e-commerce vendors, including Amazon and eBay:

That group, too, was nixed shortly after my tweet. And so it went for other groups I mentioned in my tweetstorm today. But in response to that flurry of tweets about abusive groups on Facebook, I heard from dozens of other Twitter users who said they’d received the same “does not violate our community standards” reply from Facebook after reporting other groups that clearly flouted the company’s standards.

Pete Voss, Facebook’s communications manager, apologized for the oversight.

“We’re sorry about this mistake,” Voss said. “Not removing this material was an error and we removed it as soon as we investigated. Our team processes millions of reports each week, and sometimes we get things wrong. We are reviewing this case specifically, including the user’s reporting options, and we are taking steps to improve the experience, which could include broadening the scope of categories to choose from.”

Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress last week in response to allegations that the company wasn’t doing enough to halt the abuse of its platform for things like fake news, hate speech and terrorist content. It emerged that Facebook already employs 15,000 human moderators to screen and remove offensive content, and that it plans to hire another 5,000 by the end of this year.

“But right now, those moderators can only react to posts Facebook users have flagged,” writes Will Knight, for Technologyreview.com.

Zuckerberg told lawmakers that Facebook hopes expected advances in artificial intelligence or “AI” technology will soon help the social network do a better job self-policing against abusive content. But for the time being, as long as Facebook mainly acts on abuse reports only when it is publicly pressured to do so by lawmakers or people with hundreds of thousands of followers, the company will continue to be dogged by a perception that doing otherwise is simply bad for its business model.

In 2016, KrebsOnSecurity exposed a network of phony Web sites and fake online reviews that funneled those seeking help for drug and alcohol addiction toward rehab centers that were secretly affiliated with the Church of Scientology. Not long after the story ran, that network of bogus reviews disappeared from the Web. Over the past few months, however, the same prolific purveyor of these phantom sites and reviews appears to be back at it again, enlisting the help of Internet users and paying people $25-$35 for each fake listing.

Sometime in March 2018, ads began appearing on Craigslist promoting part-time “social media assistant” jobs, in which interested applicants are directed to sign up for positions at seorehabs[dot]com. This site promotes itself as “leaders in addiction recovery consulting,” explaining that assistants can earn a minimum of $25 just for creating individual Google for Business listings tied to a few dozen generic-sounding addiction recovery center names, such as “Integra Addiction Center,” and “First Exit Recovery.”

Applicants who sign up are given detailed instructions on how to step through Google’s anti-abuse process for creating listings, which include receiving a postcard via snail mail from Google that contains a PIN which needs to be entered at Google’s site before a listing can be created.

Assistants are cautioned not to create more than two listings per street address, but otherwise to use any U.S.-based street address and to leave blank the phone number and Web site for the new business listing.

In my story Scientology Seeks Captive Converts Via Google Maps, Drug Rehab Centers, I showed how a labyrinthine network of fake online reviews that steered Internet searches toward rehab centers funded by Scientology adherents was set up by TopSeek Inc., which bills itself as a collection of “local marketing experts.” According to LinkedIn, TopSeek is owned by John Harvey, an individual (or alias) who lists his address variously as Sacramento, Calif. and Hawaii.

Although the current Web site registration records from registrar giant Godaddy obscure the information for the current owner of seorehabs[dot]com, a historic WHOIS search via Domaintools shows the site was also registered by John Harvey and TopSeek in 2015. Mr. Harvey did not respond to requests for comment. [Full disclosure: Domaintools previously was an advertiser on KrebsOnSecurity].

TopSeek’s Web site says it works with several clients, but most especially Narconon International — an organization that promotes the rather unorthodox theories of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard regarding substance abuse treatment and addiction.

As described in Narconon’s Wikipedia entry, Narconon facilities are known not only for attempting to win over new converts to Scientology, but also for treating all substance abuse addictions with a rather bizarre cocktail consisting mainly of vitamins and long hours in extremely hot saunas. Their Wiki entry documents multiple cases of accidental deaths at Narconon facilities, where some addicts reportedly died from overdoses of vitamins or neglect.

A LUCRATIVE RACKET

Bryan Seely, a security expert who has written extensively about the use of fake search listings to conduct online bait-and-switch scams, said the purpose of sites like those that Seorehabs pays people to create is to funnel calls to a handful of switchboards that then sell the leads to rehab centers that have agreed to pay for them. Many rehab facilities will pay hundreds of dollars for leads that may ultimately lead to a new patient. After all, Seely said, some facilities can then turn around and bill insurance providers for thousands of dollars per patient.

Perhaps best known for a stunt in which he used fake Google Maps listings to intercept calls destined for the FBI and U.S. Secret Service, Seely has learned a thing or two about this industry: Until 2011, he worked for an SEO firm that helped to develop and spread some of the same fake online reviews that he is now helping to clean up.

“Mr. Harvey and TopSeek are crowdsourcing the data input for these fake rehab centers,” Seely said. “The phone numbers all go to just a few dedicated call centers, and it’s not hard to see why. The money is good in this game. He sells a call for $50-$100 at a minimum, and the call center then tries to sell that lead to a treatment facility that has agreed to buy leads. Each lead can be worth $5,000 to $10,000 for a patient who has good health insurance and signs up.”

Many of the listings created by Seorehab assistants are tied to fake Google Maps entries that include phony reviews for bogus treatment centers. In the event those listings get suspended by Google, Seorehab offers detailed instructions on how assistants can delete and re-submit listings.

Assistants also can earn extra money writing fake, glowing reviews of the treatment centers:

Below are some of the plainly bogus reviews and listings created in the last month that pimp the various treatment center names and Web sites provided by Seorehabs. It is not difficult to find dozens of other examples of people who claim to have been at multiple Seorehab-promoted centers scattered across the country. For example, “Gloria Gonzalez” supposedly has been treated at no fewer than seven Seorehab-marketed detox locations in five states, penning each review just in the last month:

A reviewer using the name “Tedi Spicer” also promoted at least seven separate rehab centers across the United States in the past month. Getting treated at so many far-flung facilities in just the few months that the domains for these supposed rehab centers have been online would be an impressive feat:

Bring up any of the Web sites for these supposed rehab listings and you’ll notice they all include the same boilerplate text and graphic design. Aside from combing listings created by the reviewers paid to promote the sites, we can find other Seorehab listings just by searching the Web for chunks of text on the sites. Doing so reveals a long list (this is likely far from comprehensive) of domain names registered in the past few months that were all created with hidden registration details and registered via Godaddy.

Seely said he spent a few hours this week calling dozens of phone numbers tied to these rehab centers promoted by TopSeek, and created a spreadsheet documenting his work and results here (Google Sheets).

Seely said while he would never advocate such activity, TopSeek’s fake listings could end up costing Mr. Harvey plenty of money if someone figured out a way to either mass-report the listings as fraudulent or automate calls to the handful of hotlines tied to the listings.

“It would kill his business until he changes all the phone numbers tied to these fake listings, but if he had to do that he’d have to pay people to rebuild all the directories that link to these sites,” he said.

WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT FAKE ONLINE REVIEWS

Before doing business with a company you found online, don’t just pick the company that comes up at the top of search results on Google or any other search engine. Unfortunately, that generally guarantees little more than the company is good at marketing.

Take the time to research the companies you wish to hire before booking them for jobs or services — especially when it comes to big, expensive, and potentially risky services like drug rehab or moving companies. By the way, if you’re looking for a legitimate rehab facility, you could do worse than to start at rehabs.com, a legitimate rehab search engine.

It’s a good idea to get in the habit of verifying that the organization’s physical address, phone number and Web address shown in the search result match that of the landing page. If the phone numbers are different, use the contact number listed on the linked site.

Take the time to learn about the organization’s reputation online and in social media; if it has none (other than a Google Maps listing with all glowing, 5-star reviews), it’s probably fake. Search the Web for any public records tied to the business’ listed physical address, including articles of incorporation from the local secretary of state office online.

A search of the company’s domain name registration records can give you an idea of how long its Web site has been in business, as well as additional details about the the organization (although the ability to do this may soon be a thing of the past).

Seely said one surefire way to avoid these marketing shell games is to ask a simple question of the person who answers the phone in the online listing.

“Ask anyone on the phone what company they’re with,” Seely said. “Have them tell you, take their information and then call them back. If they aren’t forthcoming about who they are, they’re most likely a scam.”

In 2016, Seely published a book on Amazon about the thriving and insanely lucrative underground business of fake online reviews. He’s agreed to let KrebsOnSecurity republish the entire e-book, which is available for free at this link (PDF).

“This is literally the worst book ever written about Google Maps fraud,” Seely said. “It’s also the best. Is it still a niche if I’m the only one here? The more people who read it, the better.”