Whois check could have halted a scam — How a

Victims failed to notice the registration date of the domain name used to initiate the scam.

A Wendi Deng Murdoch imposter tricked photographers into paying for flights to and photography permits in Indonesia, and a more thorough Whois lookup could have saved the victims from losing money and time.

CNN notes regarding the scam that duped photographers Henry Wu and Carley Rudd. I must say, it’s much more elaborate than most scams that land in your inbox. It was well-researched and thought out.

The photographers were tricked into flying to Indonesia and buying photography permits for a gig. They later found out it was a scam and pointed out that they overlooked something obvious. The emails they received were from the domain wendimurdoch.com. That led credibility to the scam, but it turns out the domain was registered only recently:

Wu told CNN, “we overlooked the red flags. I did a DNS (search) on the (wendimurdoch.com) domain, overlooked that it had been registered a couple of weeks previously.”

(Hat tip: Name Ninja)