Counterfighting Counterfeit: detecting and taking down fraudulent webshops at a ccTLD

Luxury goods such as sneakers and bags are in high demand. Many websites offer them at high discounts, which, in many cases, are simply cheap counterfeit versions of the original product. Online shop- pers, however, may be unaware they are buying a counterfeit product and end up being scammed and having to deal with financial losses, as has been widely reported by various news outlets. This work presents a multiyear effort of The Netherlands’ .nl country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) in detecting and removing counterfeit online shops from the .nl DNS zone. We have developed two detection systems and partnered with registrars and a large credit card issuer, which ultimately led to more than 4,400 counterfeit online shops being taken down.