Around March 2023 a group of scammers embarked on a campaign of offering “Life Time Listing” for small businesses on Instagram (Facebook-owned) and “Business Verification” for $399 (AUD). They used Stripe as their payment processor and unfortunately they are still active there as of 13 June 2024.
Their initial websites were:
- australianbrb[.]com (Registered on&at 2023-03-27T01:50:47Z)
- ausbrb[.]org (Registered on&at 2023-03-27T01:50:50Z)
- ausbrbhonor[.]com (The site was redirecting to australiabrb[.]com and it was registered on&at 2023-10-02T03:11:09Z)
- instagram[.]com/AUSBRB/
Below is a screenshot of their website:
Some quick red flags:
- not a .com.au domain name, which would be obvious for any Australian business. This is because they do not have an Australian Business Number (ABN)
- the domain is reasonably young (March 2023)
- you must pay quickly, via Stripe. Why not via their own website???
- Why would a big business like Kmart need to be “reviewed” by such a “service”???
Reviews on the Internet about the ABRB:
* https://www.reddit.com/r/AusBiz/comments/1asoolz/australianbrbcom_dodgy/
* https://www.scamadviser.com/check-website/australiabrb.com
If you have paid them you are a victim of a scam. Technically what they are doing may not be criminal fraud, but they are definitely not worth $399.
Now the big issue is that in Australia there is no way to have access to these kind of websites blocked by all Internet Service Providers (ISP). On the other hand a big movie studio and similar rich and influential businesses can get an order from the Federal Court to have any torrent website blocked by all Australian ISPs since 2016. It shows who is more important to successive Australian governments and it appears it is not the voters.
If you need advice/training on how to avoid these scams in the future just contact me.