Why is Cybertrace being impersonated?
Cybertrace Pty Ltd was founded in 2015 to assist those who have fallen victim to scams and Police are unable to help, either due to their high workload or various other reasons. The company was started by Dan Halpin, who grew the business over almost 10 years to what it is today, a high-quality leading cyber investigations firm, comprised of a passionate, high-performing, and intelligent team of experts, with backgrounds in psychology, cybersecurity, investigations, and other related professions. However, due to the company’s success, Cybertrace is often impersonated through various mediums such as websites and Google Ads such as the Payback Ltd recent attack (see below).
How much we’ve grown as a company
In 2023, Cybertrace’s website traffic increased by a whopping 500%, and thus scammers caught onto this, seizing the opportunity to create domain names similar in appearance to ours, such as cybertrace.finance, and cybertrace.tech. They even forged our brand new email signature, albeit very poorly.
How is Cybertrace being impersonated?
Fake Cybertrace Emails
While this does look quite similar to our current email signature, those with a keen eye can spot something fishy in the above screenshot. The content of this email mentioned that fake Cybertrace was able to find over 5 Bitcoin in a liquidity pool belonging to their target! This is a tactic that’s often part of a Bitcoin recovery scam.
In these cases, if you’re contacted by a company who states they are Cybertrace, It’s important to verify you’re talking to the real company. Furthermore, Cybertrace will rarely reach out to those who haven’t contacted us prior, especially for situations like that.
What are the official Cybertrace email addresses?
Generally, we will only contact you via our official email addresses, which are,
However, on occasion, a senior investigator may speak with you, but at this point you would have been informed of the senior investigator planning on reaching out, by one of the above email addresses.
Fake Cybertrace Social Media Accounts
Cybertrace is often impersonated on Facebook. This is due to the high volume of individuals on the platform. However, these pages often don’t last very long before being removed. In the above image you can see an interesting choice of font, and a Facebook page which has purchased followers. You can even see them re-posting our media appearances, to appear legitimate.
These Facebook pages don’t do a very good job at pretending they’re Cybertrace, with the use of @gmail.com accounts, a total mess in their branding and a number of inconsistencies throughout the board, it’s fairly easy to tell, they’re not the real Cybertrace, despite their thousands of purchased page likes.
Fake Cybertrace websites
While we generally don’t give our investigators an “efficiency rate”, this fake cybertrace website (cybertrace.finance) stated that they’re pretty good! Unfortunately for them, we took their website down using Darkivore.
Google advertisements under our brand name
Here’s a recent example where Israeli company, Payback Ltd felt the need to use our trademarked brand name in their paid Google Ads. Is this a form of phishing? Potentially. From our review, this appears to be in breach of Google’s Advertisement Guidelines. When direct contact with the owner of Payback Ltd failed to stop the apparent infringement, Cybertrace reported the Advertisement Guidelines breach to Google.
In attempts to tip-toe around advertising laws and Google’s advertising policies, some companies such as Israel based, Payback Ltd have decided to use Cybertrace’s name for their advertising campaigns. While we’re unable to verify the legitimacy of those who choose to do this, their decision to tightrope-walk along what is considered ethical and legal, showcases Cybertrace’s highly desired investigations.
Our investigators are proud of the reports they produce and it’s clear that our investigations products are very much above the industry standard. And furthermore, we’ve built some amazing free tools that anyone can use, to check a scam number, email address, or website.
What makes Cybertrace the best?
While trying to always maintain an unbiased approach, Cybertrace is the best cyber investigations company because both their ethical and reporting standards are very high. Cybertrace, being licenced and accredited private investigators for nearly 10 years, have the experience behind them and tools which are unavailable to other investigations companies, such as Darkivore.
Tags: Payback, Scam, Impersonator, Fake, Cybertrace
