Tencent Hosting Is a Safe Haven for Illegal Operations
Tencent is a Chinese domain registrar, hosting provider, and cloud infrastructure company whose services are being used to host scam websites. Based on our company's experience, fraudsters have used Tencent-hosted servers to run phishing sites, social engineering schemes, illegal gambling websites, and other scam operations. Our company was directly targeted by scammers using websites hosted on Tencent's infrastructure. This is not an isolated issue. Other reviewers have also reported illegal casino and gambling websites hosted through Tencent. In practice, Tencent's platform has become a safe haven for criminals who run scam operations. Most criminals who want to host websites to scam people, Tencent is one of the providers they can use. Scam sites appear remain active while victims are left dealing with the damage. I have spoken with the FBI about this issue after we had been targeted as well. I didn't know who Tencent was at the time and reported the issue and was surprised first that Tencent did not do anything. FBI told me they receive 4,000 scam reports every day, and that there is no communication channel with the Chinese authorities. This leaves victims with no realistic path to enforcement while scammers continue targeting American residents through infrastructure hosted in China through Tencent. Right now, based on our experience and communication with the FBI, Tencent is a provider that enables scammers by giving them the infrastructure they need to operate.