Maybe I can scam proof some fellow shooters
Ran across winchesterprimers.com. $70 per brick. I put 3 small and 3 large bricks in the cart and went to checkout. Payment options were Venmo, Bitcoin or Cashapp. No credit or debit cards. Nope, I'm outa here.
Good choice.
Let's talk a bit about how domain names work and why
winchesterprimers.com should have given the scam away without ever clicking that link.
The fully qualified domain name is an internet address, and they read right to left in specificity. We typically see '.com' or '.net' followed by a slash. Anything to the right of the 3rd slash in the address is a pointer to specific page that your address is trying to find. To the left of the 3rd slash will be the 'domain suffix', which can also can tell you where the domain should be located.
More on domain suffixes here:
https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/num/domains.htm
'.com' is the commercial suffix for US domains.
Moving left in the address you get the actual domain name. In the link above that domain is
computerhope.
Some entity owns the name computerhope.com (which is not the same as say, computerhope.net). Many tech savvy companies will grab up a lot of their product name and domain permutations and re-direct them to their main domain (try going to apple.net for example, you will end up on apple.com. They also own iphone.com)
If you want to know who owns a domain you can do a public record search at
https://lookup.icann.org/lookup to see who the
registrar (this is a service that lets the WWW know what IP address is associated with a domains) and
registrant (this is who handles registering a domain name) is. (Many companies will contract this type of work to vendors). If we punch in winchester.com we see that the
registrar is a Canadian company called Contact Privacy Inc. There is also a contact email address and phone number.
Note, there are commercial whois.net and whois.com sites that can also provide this info but they run advertisements and try to sell you stuff. ICANN is the where they are retrieving info.
Winchester.com's registrant is TUCOWS. (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucows)
There is another trick a domain can use to direct incoming traffic and segment as they would like, and that is to add another apparent domain name in front of their actual domain (say, iphone.apple.com). Your browser will read that as looking for a website at apple.com titled iphone.
So, if for example, Winchester wanted to specifically sell primers on its own website, they could simply publish
primers.winchester.com. This would be a separate website hosted on their servers, but they wouldn't need to register a new domain.
Going to
primers.winchester.com results in an error.
Because Winchester's servers are not hosting a website called primers.winchester.com.
Going back to the icann lookup link, let's punch in winchesterprimers.com
hmmm...
Registrant:
Kind: individual
Mailing Address: douala, CM
<----- that looks a bit suspicious, eh?
What is Douala, CM? Oh, that is
Douala, Cameroon!
Going down a bit on that page you find the Registrar information, and again, it is good ol' TUCOWS. There is also an 'abuse contact email'. Which I will be making use of in this case.
Hope this helps someone.