Resource networks of pet scam websites

The pet scam is a form of online fraud in which scammers leverage victims' emotional attachment to fictitious pets as a means for extorting money. Both fraudulent pet seller sites and fraudulent delivery sites are involved in the scam. When sites of either kind are taken down, scammers create new sites, often reusing effective content from previous scams. We explore connections within the largest current collection of pet scam websites, examining four distinct types of resource sharing that are indicative of shared authorship. We find that 90% of all accessible sites share at least one form of connection to another known site, including many identifiable links between seller and delivery sites, and that some scam authors could be behind hundreds of individual scam websites. We partially validate our linkage methods using domain registration data, and discuss the implications of using different connection types to analyse online fraud more generally.