Why “One-and-Done” is Not Enough: The Cat-and-Mouse Effect of Manual Scam Takedowns

There’s a certain satisfaction that comes with seeing a phishing site or fraudulent app finally taken off the internet. For a moment, the threat seems neutralized. The customer is safe. The brand is safe. But for anyone who has dealt with these challenges, that satisfaction of finality usually doesn’t last longer than the next coffee break. Almost immediately, the same scam reappears elsewhere. Different domain. Different host. Same scam. This is the reality of modern cyber defense: we are not fighting discrete events; we are fighting adaptive, persistent campaigns conducted by professional criminal organizations that have industrialized fraud. Every manual takedown we celebrate for its inconsequentiality may simply be a minor nuisance to an attacker presented with dozens of backup domains ready to go – if we don’t address the scale and infrastructure cybercriminals leverage.

The industrialization of modern cybercrime campaigns works more like legitimate SaaS businesses than legacy opportunistic attacks, complete with infrastructure-as-a-service, backup systems, performance metrics, and customer service. The most sophisticated adversaries may not pay much attention to the disruption generated by a single takedown that leads the defenders to celebrate what appears to be a monumental victory. In fact, for some cybercriminals a single takedown is merely a part of the cost of doing business. Many cybercriminals have layered contingency plans, often with additional domains already fired up and ready to take redirected traffic. This asymmetry defines the cat-and-mouse game, and it’s why defenders must be empowered to scale their takedowns and take down the infrastructure behind the phishing attacks.

Architecture of Resilience

Criminal enterprises have hardwired resilience into every level of their operations, creating systems that regenerate faster than they take them down.

Phishing Kits and Templated Attacks: At the heart of many scam campaigns lies a phishing kit: a pre-assembled bundle of code that convincingly mimics a legitimate login page or payment portal. These kits are reusable templates that can be deployed time and again with little effort. One kit may generate hundreds of phishing sites, each identical in functionality but hosted on different infrastructure. When takedown occurs on a site, the kit is simply executed elsewhere. The investment in the creation of the kit is spread out over the hundreds of deployments that occur, with manual takedowns being economically insignificant.

Domain Registration at Scale: Attackers register domains in bulks of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of domains. These domains serve as an inventory — a warehouse of infrastructure that can be activated at a moment’s notice. When one domain is taken down, traffic is simply redirected to another from the inventory reserve. This warehousing of domains means that manual takedowns usually accomplish nothing more than speeding up the overturning of attackers’ inventory slightly, forcing them to burn it down.

Hosting Infrastructure: Modern scam operations operate using compromised legit servers (who come with built-in trust signals), disposable cloud accounts created using stolen payment mechanisms, bulletproof hosting providers in jurisdictions with weak enforcement, and CDNs that hide the real hosting location. This multi-layered, geographically diverse infrastructure means there always exist further places they could be hidden or services used or other hosts which they could be pivoted to.

Failure of the Manual Approach to Brand Risk Mitigation

The traditional way to tackle external cyber threats has been reactive, to find crime, investigate it, obtain evidence for it, collaborate with the relevant partners and take it down. Each crime is treated as a separate incident. Find, remove, close ticket, move on to the next.

Manual takedown processes, where security analysts individually investigate each scam, compile evidence, contact hosting providers, and track resolution, cannot match the velocity of modern attack campaigns. While manual investigation has its place for complex cases requiring human judgment, relying on manual processes as the primary response mechanism creates an insurmountable speed gap. Attackers can deploy new scam sites in minutes using automated tools, while manual takedowns often take days to complete. This asymmetry guarantees that defenders will always be overwhelmed. Modern brand protection requires automation wherever possible — automated detection of new scam sites, automated evidence collection, automated routing of takedown requests to the appropriate parties, and automated verification that takedowns have been successful. Equally important is addressing the underlying infrastructure that enables rapid scam regeneration.

Rather than treating each scam site as an isolated incident, effective brand protection must target the networks of domains, phishing kits, hosting relationships, and payment channels that allow campaigns to operate at scale. By disrupting the infrastructure layer, organizations can more effectively degrade the attacker's ability to regenerate efficiently. Think of “whack-a-mole” less as comprehensive brand protection with one person desperately trying to keep the attacks at bay one-at-a-time – and more like a small part a sophisticated brand protection program, with a team of automated mallets disarming the attacks faster than anyone else – so it can scale as malicious infrastructure is identified and removed.

The Customer Impact: For the customer the repeat exposure to the scams results irrespective of how quickly each scam is taken down, in a cumulative effect for their trust. Each exposure to a phishing attempt eats away at the customers' trust in digital commerce. They will be more wary of clicking on links in legitimate emails. They will be more prone to abandoning chargeable transactions because of doubt. They will disseminate doubts about the security competence of your organization.

The question the customer will ask will change from "Did this company take action when they knew about this scam?" to " Why was this company unable to prevent these scams occurring in the first place?" This change shows a fundamental loss of confidence in the whole security structure of the organization.

From Reaction to Resilience: A Different Defensive Posture

An effective defense requires a seismic shift away from a temporary, manual engagement posture, to one of continuous, automated engagement always observing, always analyzing, always adjusting.

Think Campaigns, not Incidents: It’s important for a security team to train itself to recognize and track the scam campaigns that typically behave as strategic entities rather than groups of clearly distinct specific incidents. This means figuring out all the elements in common amongst attacks that apparently are distinct, i.e., the same phish kit, the same backend infrastructure, commonalities in the targeting, or the same cryptocurrency wallets receiving the stolen funds. By mapping these attacks to the phish kits, as an example, defenders can begin the move away from reacting to scam sites toward disruption of the entire scam infrastructure.

Intelligence Based Defense: The contemporary scam defenses must be threat intelligence driven, as opposed to simply detection driven. Monitoring indicators of domain registration can flag potentially suspicious large number of registrations. Monitoring the use of known phishing kits shows when they are actively distributed. Monitoring relationships between domains, hosting entities, and threat actors will produce a picture of the criminal infrastructure ecosystem where one is able to know where attacks will follow. This layer of intelligence is the key to transforming the position of the defender from a purely reactive one to one that can be fully automated and actionable.

Speed is a strategic imperative: In the economics of scam operations, time is money. Every hour a scam site exists is another hour victims are exposed to it. Reducing the time lag between initial deployment and takedown is in direct proportion to one’s return on investment to the attacker. When a takedown takes days or weeks attackers have the advantage, shift that to hours and now the defender has the more profitable position.  However, doing so requires strong infrastructure relationships and advanced automation, wherever possible, be it automatic detection, evidence collection, takedown routing, testing, or all of the above.

Collaborative defense: No one organization can effectively handle scam operations solo. In fact, effective defense requires cooperation with the domain registries, the hosting companies, the CDN companies and cloud platforms, establishing the levels of trust and communication that allow for rapid reaction when discovering malicious infrastructure elements. It means enabling information sharing and building trust with industry verticals and infrastructure providers.

Breaking the cycle

The cat-and-mouse game is frustrating to the players since it never seems to end. Unfortunately, the perspective can’t be to try and eliminate scams altogether, the economic incentives which make fraud lucrative for criminals still exist. Instead the objective should be to change the economics and increase the operational costs for threat actors.

When organizations see scams as what they really are (ongoing, constantly changing campaigns requiring continuous engagement), they can move from reacting to individual incidents toward systematically dismantling the attacker’s infrastructure. This is achieved through automation to identify and eliminate not only the visible scams, but the entire infrastructure ecosystem, which permits rapid reproduction: networks of domains registered en masse, phishing kit distribution networks, compromised hosting accounts, and pathways for payment processing. Advanced automation systems can detect patterns of seemingly disparate scams, mapping the connections that reveal shared infrastructure and allowing for coordinated shutdown actions that disrupt multiple campaigns simultaneously.

A single takedown is necessary but inadequate on its own. It’s a tactical victory, found in a strategic campaign. Success means the automated removal of domains, hosting accounts, and distribution channels happens faster than attackers can rebuild, forcing them into a constant cycle of infrastructure reconstruction. As the cycle of infrastructure removal acceleration exceeds the ability of the attacker to rebuild, campaigns collapse as they become operationally unsustainable.

This is the great challenge and opportunity for organizations who are serious about protecting their customers and their brands. The work is not in achieving a final victory, but in establishing automated capabilities and strategic alliances, enabling one to detect and dismantle the criminal infrastructure quicker than the attackers can rebuild it. Breaking the cycle implies the use of automation and intelligence in such a way that favors the defender, causing each rebuilding of the infrastructure to be markedly more expensive and longer in execution time, each campaign shorter in duration, and the overall criminal undertaking to become economically unviable for those who would prey on your customers’ trust.