Security

Update 2nd December 2017:
After receiving comments to this blog post, I started doing more digging and there is a new blog post about EBN scam.

Today I got yet another snail mail scam as a printed letter. It looks like this:

The scammers are claiming, that they are missing my corporate VAT ID. Hm. That's strange. All the other information they got from Finnish Business Registry (ytj.fi). But as they are missing my valuable VAT-number, I'll need to fill it into a pre-filled form and add a binding signature. I'm not exactly sure, what exactly should I do with this form after signing it, but such a form was sent to me.

Caution! Scam here is in the monotype-font part (see above page 2):

Order: We hereby confirm the accuracy of our company' s data as per the information given above and we hereby place an order with DAD GmbH (Publisher) to publish them in a graphically highlighted form on www.e-b-n.eu according to the general terms and conditions printed overleaf.

We accept the advertisement' s annual costs of 890 Euro, which are payable in advance upon receipt of the invoice. We acknowledge that the contract is valid for the next three years and subsequently will be automatically extended annually unless we provide a written notice requesting termination of the contract, this being no later than three months before the expiration of the contract's term.

We are only able to revoke the contract by registered letter within fourteen days of the order date; whereby the date of postage is decisive. We authorize the Publisher to use contents found on our website for the layout of our insertion.

We acknowledge Hamburg-Mitte as place of performance and jurisdiction and that German law is solely applicable. We confirm that prior to this order placement we had no business relationship with the Publisher. We agree that our company's data will be stored electronically.

Whoa! That's a long and difficult to read. All that easier to miss the part with "We accept the advertisement' s annual costs of 890 Euro, which are payable in advance upon receipt of the invoice". Oh! I thought this was some kind of "final reminder", not an order nor invoice.

There is an actual website http://e-b-n.eu/ with all collected publicly available business information in it.

To make this scam more believable, scammers added actual addresses and phone numbers in Hamburg, Germany. I don't know if neither of them are legit. I do know, that German business registry doesn't have Commercial Register, Companies' Section, Hamburg Local Court, Record No. 88115 with name of European Business Register. Actually, that record number belongs to somebody completely innocent. Also the German VAT ID of 813739877 seems to belong to somebody, but I don't know how to do a lookup on German VAT IDs, so I don't know whose VAT ID it is.

By googling the VAT ID, I found pretty much the same letter sent to Italian doctors "Registro Italiano Medici: attenzione alla modulistica". There is a scanned PDF of the letter. Funnily, it has the same German VAT ID, and Mrs. Daniela Kunst as the managing director of EuroMedi (http://euromedi.eu/). The price is bit cheaper, only 877 €. Also the website is hosted in the exactly same IP-address in Köln, Germany. Also, there is Deutsche Internet Kartei and Internet Register Österreich with same VAT ID and managing director, but on a different server.

Based on a report by (Caution: European Central Register of VAT Registration Numbers is a scam) German law firm, this scam has been going on since 2013. So, looks like their business is lucrative and nobody seems to be able to stop them.