 So be welcome to the next talk. We start a little earlier than announced in the schedule Megacorp is the name of a huge conglomerate you may know from science fiction, but Megacorp is real It exists actually its mission is to acquire all fraudulent and scam companies that populate the internet And even already have tried to scam you so Megacorp is an umbrella cooperation That includes all scam companies and it's a piece of art. So please welcome the two artists Linda Kronman and Andreas Singele who will talk you tell you everything you need to know about Megacorp Hello, my name is Andreas Singele and together with my partner Linda Kronman We will present you our recent artistic research project The title of our talk is trust us and our business will expand visualizing fake websites from the artist against 419 database Okay, I want to briefly introduce ourselves We work under the art collective name Kairas over the last five years We have been focusing on internet fraud internet scams as a main topic of our artistic research And we were researching into Um different vigilante communities that Try to stop internet fraud and to jam the working practices of internet scammers And one of these subgroups is called the artist against 419 as you see a screenshot here of their database website Um And when you visit the uh AA for one line database you can open the different links that you see And these links are uh entries that are reported fake companies Um They are reported to the hosting providers and they are in the process of being checked by the hosting providers and then taken offline So it can happen that these websites Disappear rather quickly from this list and are after a couple of hours not working anymore And we couldn't find an overview or a visualization on What kind of companies are these fake websites and what do they represent? And these lead us to start working on an artwork that tries to visualize this repository So looking at the tactics of these vigilante communities Um, we can find old tactics and newer tactics that they use older tactics were Like bandwidth hogging or DDoS attacks They were using self-programmed software called muguito or lead vampire And basically it was a freeware programs web-based applications that was Very easy to use you just started up the program and left it running in the background The program was repeatedly downloading images and hdml files from the scam website until the bandwidth limit was exceeded Once the website was shut down by the hosting company They would either refuse to host the website again or would insist to charge a higher fee to the fraudster Because he's using uh more of the the bandwidth So some present tactics Um Include that the members are collecting evidence and information about these fake websites That and they try to prove or at least to raise the suspicion that this Company website is a fake business They write complaint letters to the hosting providers and in general try to maintain good relation To the hosting providers and to the law enforcement that they Collaborate with So when we look at some of the open source intelligence tools that they are using Then we see that they Cross check who is and dns entries They contact the official website owners and see what who is repeating there and who is answering their questions They crawl the web for copies of the website They check registers In the specific countries That's the company claims to be registered if there is any official files about it They even visit the physically addresses to see if the company is located there And there are many other tools available But we wanted to also focus on the tools and on the strategies that this online community is using So, yeah do Who is look up you see who owns the domain and The result will tell you the register the company where the domain was purchased through When it was created when it expires and as well additional contact details And one of the key observations is to look for how long this website or the domain has been registered often Members say that if a domain Is active for less than a year But on their page they claim to be a well established business Then it's maybe already suspicious and it's one that should be further steps taken to look At the website Then of course the contact information like what are the ways to get in touch with the website owner Are the emails that are used are they part of the top level domain or are they using free email services? Is it a valid address? Can you find it on different? map services Are the phone numbers provided can you call the during business hours and so on So sometimes you can also check the html code and see If they're if the website was copied or scraped before from a different domain For example, this is a screenshot of an Austrian company. It's called start office. It's registered in Vienna But when you look at the html code, you see that the website was copied from a domain Which is Sun X solutions And 19th of october and this company Sun X solutions you find again in the database from the artist against 419, so It looked like that. They just made a copy of a fraudulent website and created a new logo and published it under a different domain name A lot of the fake sites can be found by searching for text phrases or sentences Therefore you can find other fake websites or the original page where Text has been copied from For this actually they use different plagiarism checkers like this copiescape But there are Different other programs that you can use that was just one example Once they gathered this different information that should raise a suspicion or prove that it's a fake company They start filing a report where they also have generators to do that or to assist in these steps going through it Basically the contact the hosting providers and the registrar and they look for other possibilities to warn potential victims or other Organizations like in Austria, there is the watchlist internet where you can report fake businesses Or some of the scambaiting community members also set up websites and platforms like like the scam warners where you can discuss business proposals or Search for these fake websites And of course you should also report it to the artist against 419 so that they can include it in their database and that already being listed in this database can Be Delt with as an argument to further explore A fake business so As andrea's earlier told we were curious to find out what kind of businesses were represented on the fake websites We wanted to comment on the template based aesthetics of today's company Representations and we wanted to put an emphasis on the structures of centralization of money and power The inspiration we took from science fiction as was told in our Introduction, especially from william gibson who actually coined the term mega corp As a big evil corporation that wants to take over the world And these mega corps Are operated in operating several industries and are most often described as monopolistic conglomerates So in science fiction There are many example of mega corps some of the logos we have also seen people wearing here at the conference For example the tyrol corporation from blade runner or the weyland utani corp from alien But of course there are many more And then there are the real world examples Maybe the east indian trade company that is often To have been the first multinational corporation in the world is a good example It had stock monopoly on space trade issued their own stocks and and also Had army that protected their trading ships Another real world Example could be the saudi aramco. This is the world's most valuable mega Valuable mega corp with the world's largest crude oil reserves And I quote from their 2014 facts and figures report From building roads railroads schools and hospitals to establishing wildlife sanctuaries and growing Knowledge economy. We have always been Engage improving the quality of life for the people of saudi arabia And of course we know a lot of other mega corps also in the tech world so This is our mega corp And these fictional and real world examples Where our sources for Creating our mega corp Which is a visualization of 1000 fake companies To start with we had one challenge When websites were listed in the database of the hosting providers Often hosting providers blocked the website So we could not go back to the websites to analyze them The database only saves the name of the website and the who is information And this was not enough for us to actually have time to look at the website So we decided to scrape 1000 website and this took us about four months To get our sample probe We were not doing this on a daily basis. So this graph here doesn't really show how many fake websites were reported during this time But anyhow, it gives a picture of of how and when we scraped them And the next task was to go through all these websites and see what information we could find And how we could categorize the websites And within this process we categorize the company starting with 31 different categories and then merging them to 10 to have kind of Something that makes sense in the end So these are our business segments of of mega corp and Here you see that transport and logistics Are the biggest one followed by banks that are usually used for phishing attacks and are most often clones of real websites Maybe a surprise is the fourth biggest business segment, which is online pet shops and animal transport We also looked into the claimed headquarters locations of the companies UK with 220 companies and the london area with 118 companies really stands out Also, there are 22 percent of the websites that are not given Don't give any location for their activities This and more information we collected into a website and printed interim report Uh, we also have a couple of copies with us. So please come and get yours after the presentations we have their also like The The dates are kind of put into segments into the different business segments Where do the headquarters of different business segments? Where are they positioned and so on And of course because it's an interim report and we kind of had Annual reports as are As our inspiration the report also states a mission and a vision And of course we have a letter from the ceo's as well So besides the interim report The installation setup is created to look like a professional presentation Of a corporate with roll-ups data visualization visualizations A pc where you can browse through the scraped websites We have several videos playing in the gallery one showing the key figures of megacorp in a corporate show reel with fancy animations and uplifting music Another video shows our attempt to visit the companies and show what buildings and businesses are located At the real addresses in this case Of in the case of banks like this one in akra The building really exists while the website is a clone Other times we ended up in weird places like this residential area in glasco This building should be the headquarters of international credit union Obviously the address was just chosen randomly Megacorp also has three headquarters in hamburg That we plan to visit actually during this conference. One is actually really close to here at dumtostrasse 14 Where a logistic company called multi logistics dot com should be located This is how it looks like and there is no multi logistics there. So A third video Shows the main features of the website Here for example one of the eight websites that sells chemicals and powders to clean black money The website connects to an email scam called black money scam This is a scam you need to buy special chemicals To wash off defaced black currency So to conclude we wanted to create artwork that visualizes The effort that this scam baiting community is doing And to create a time capsule of fake websites So thank you and at megacorp.chirus.org you can visit the websites They are there as screenshots in the gallery setup. We actually have the real websites But there you also see the different segments and how many Companies are in each segment and where they are located and the reports are here So, thank you very much the representatives of megacorp For your understanding talk, please line up at the microphones if you have any questions We have still 10 minutes left. So go ahead Can please one of the audio angels so Did the companies behind your site ever try to retire yet by threatening or attacking your website? So you're asking if some of the fraudulent company owners were trying to Attack our website or try to have you your website get done or do anything against you or they just like It's just could be busting and they don't don't care of what's happening No, we didn't have any of these cases yet. I often like within the artist against 419 forums, I often read that The the scammers or the criminals are registering an account and then they Claim that hey, we are a real business take my website off your Database because this is bad reputation for our customers and so on. So Thank you Next are there any questions from the internet So I would say if there are no questions left. I think there is there someone Oh, so I would say Thank you very much and a warm round of applause for Linda Kohler and the singer for the talk. Thank you very much