Provide current and historical ownership information on domains / IPs. Identify all connections between domains, registrants, registrars, and DNS servers.
On 9–10 June 2026, more than 800 scam fighters from around the world came together at Convento do Beato in Lisbon, Portugal, for the Global Anti-Scam Summit Europe 2026, organized by the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA).
WhoisXML API attended the event, represented by Anna Danilova and Alexandre François, joining government agencies, law enforcement, regulators, financial institutions, technology companies, consumer protection organizations, researchers, NGOs, and anti-trafficking experts working toward a shared goal: combating scams at scale.
Across two days, the summit covered many of the issues shaping today’s anti-scam response, from scam compounds and public-private partnerships to agentic AI, online impersonation, data sharing, victim support, and the infrastructure that enables large-scale fraud.
One message stood out across the sessions: scams are not only a technical or financial crime problem. They are a human problem, a trust problem, and increasingly, a structural problem.
In cybersecurity and fraud prevention, it is easy to focus on visible technical indicators: domains, IP addresses, fake apps, phishing pages, crypto wallets, malicious ads, spoofed calls, and suspicious payment flows. Technical signals are essential to investigations, but GASS 2026 Lisbon was also a reminder that every signal points to real-world harm: people being targeted, organizations being impersonated or abused, and sometimes individuals being coerced into enabling scams.
Fraud Is Cross-Border, Cross-Platform, and Cross-Sector
In the opening remarks, João Ribeiro, Country Manager at DECO PROteste, framed online fraud as a challenge that crosses borders, platforms, and sectors while exploiting trust in institutions, technology, and one another.
That framing matters because scams rarely stay in one environment. A single campaign can move from a social media message to an encrypted chat, a newly registered domain or cloned website, paid ads, brand impersonation, and finally a bank transfer, card payment, or crypto transaction.
Each organization may see only one fragment of that chain. That fragmentation is exactly what scammers exploit, and several sessions returned to the same question: how can the ecosystem connect those fragments faster and act before the harm spreads?
The Human Impact Should Stay at the Center
Some of the most difficult sessions focused on scam compounds and the human rights abuses behind them. Discussions about forced labor, human trafficking, and organized criminal networks made it impossible to treat scams as an abstract digital risk.
That point was also reinforced in the keynote by U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, who described the devastating impact of cryptocurrency investment scams on victims and the transnational criminal networks operating behind many of these schemes. Her remarks connected the human cost of fraud with the organized infrastructure that allows these operations to scale.
In the “What’s Next for Scam Compounds?” session, speakers including Montse Ferrer, Mina Chiang, Nathaniel Gleicher, Toby Evans, and Erika Kinetz explored the scale and complexity of these operations. One of the strongest takeaways was that people are not only being defrauded; in some cases, people are also being coerced into defrauding others.
That dual victimization complicates the anti-scam response. It shows why the goal cannot be limited to isolated takedowns or individual enforcement actions. Investigators need to understand the broader network, distinguish operators from coerced participants, support enforcement efforts, and keep the people being exploited at the center of the response.
Awareness Alone Is Not Enough
Another powerful theme from the event was victim psychology.
Many scam prevention efforts still assume that if people are warned clearly enough, they will disengage. But scams work because they exploit trust, loneliness, ambition, fear, urgency, shame, and identity. In romance, investment, job, and impersonation scams, the victim may experience the interaction not as a transaction, but as a relationship, opportunity, or lifeline.
That is why a warning such as “this is a scam” can sometimes feel like an attack on the victim’s judgment or emotional reality, especially if the fraudster has spent weeks or months building trust.
Effective intervention therefore needs more than detection. It needs timing, empathy, and design. It needs to help people pause, create room for doubt, and make support easy to accept without making victims feel blamed.
A working group at the event showed that this thinking is already being translated into technology. For the technical community, that is an important reminder: better data, models, and detection systems are necessary, but anti-fraud tools also need to account for how people actually respond under manipulation.
Fraud Is Becoming a Financial Integrity Issue
The FATF keynote by Giles Thomson and Johan Almenberg added another important dimension: fraud is increasingly being treated not only as a consumer protection issue, but as a financial integrity issue.
That shift matters because scam proceeds move through the same global systems that anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing frameworks are designed to protect. Fraud affects financial trust, financial inclusion, asset recovery, and cross-border cooperation. It also relies on infrastructure that spans regulated and less-regulated sectors.
Every sector sees a different part of the chain. Banks see payment behavior. Platforms see accounts and messaging patterns. Registrars and hosting providers see domain and infrastructure abuse. Cybersecurity companies see technical indicators. Consumer organizations see victim reports. Law enforcement sees investigations and criminal networks.
None of these views is complete on its own.
That is why public-private and private-private collaboration are becoming central to anti-scam work. The challenge is not simply to collect more data, but to turn fragmented observations into actionable intelligence that can support takedowns, investigations, asset recovery, victim support, and policy change.
AI Is Changing the Scam Equation
The agentic AI session, featuring Yogesh Patel, Aaron Chiou, Gabriel Hopkins, and Jack Stubbs, showed how quickly AI is reshaping both fraud and fraud prevention. Scammers are already using generative AI to scale translation, impersonation, victim research, and social engineering. The next phase may be more complex: AI systems that do not just generate content, but take action.
That creates new trust questions. Is there a human on the other side? Is an action authorized? Is an AI agent acting on behalf of a real user, or being manipulated by a criminal? Can fraud detection systems distinguish between legitimate automation and malicious automation at scale?
The answer will likely require more than one signal or one control. Fraud teams will need layered context across behavior, transactions, identity, devices, infrastructure, and shared threat intelligence.
Cybercrime Pathways Are Changing Too
A separate session by Fergus Hay added another future-facing angle: the people behind cybercrime are changing too. His remarks focused on gaming-native, often very young technical talent whose skills may be invisible to traditional education and hiring systems but highly relevant to cybersecurity.
The point was not to romanticize cybercrime, but to recognize risk earlier. Skills such as pattern recognition, systems thinking, software modification, adversarial thinking, and intelligence gathering can be exploited by criminal networks, or redirected toward ethical cybersecurity work. Prevention, in this sense, is not only about blocking abuse after it happens, but also about creating legitimate pathways before that talent is pulled into harmful activity.
From Silos to Signals
The “Silos to Signals” session, with Lucien Taylor, Jayde Richmond, Mark Chen, Nick Sharp, and Andre Naumann, reinforced the need to turn fragmented information into shared intelligence.
Scammers benefit when signals stay separated. One organization may see the domain. Another may see the ad. Another may see the payment. Another may receive the victim report. Individually, each signal may look limited. Together, they can reveal infrastructure, patterns, and intent.
This is one of the areas where WhoisXML API’s work is especially relevant. Domain, DNS, IP, WHOIS/RDAP, SSL certificate, and threat intelligence data can help connect suspicious assets and enrich investigations. When combined with signals from other sectors, infrastructure intelligence can support earlier detection, faster investigation, and more coordinated disruption.
The Work Continues After Lisbon
The Global Anti-Scam Summit Europe 2026 made one thing clear: the anti-scam ecosystem has more awareness, stronger partnerships, and greater willingness to share intelligence and turn it into action. But the fraud landscape continues to evolve, especially around major global events, new technologies, payment channels, platform defenses, and public attention.
FIFA World Cup 2026 is one example. Large global events create ideal conditions for fraud: urgency, emotion, ticket scarcity, cross-border demand, travel planning, fake merchandise, impersonation pages, and cloned websites. GASA recently highlighted research into “Ghost Stadium,” a phishing operation reportedly involving cloned FIFA ticket websites, social media ads, search engines, Telegram, WhatsApp, and thousands of scam domains.
This is why the work cannot stop at awareness. Fraud prevention requires continuous monitoring, faster signal sharing, and the ability to connect infrastructure before campaigns reach more victims.
From Signals to Action
The strongest takeaway from the Global Anti-Scam Summit Europe 2026 was the need to turn fragmented signals into coordinated action.
Infrastructure intelligence has an important role in that process. Domains, DNS records, IP addresses, registration data, SSL certificates, and threat intelligence can help reveal patterns, relationships, and infrastructure reuse that may otherwise remain hidden.
For WhoisXML API, this is where data can support the broader anti-scam ecosystem: not by replacing human judgment, victim support, law enforcement, or policy work, but by helping investigators and defenders see more of the picture sooner.
Ultimately, fighting scams is about protecting trust. The summit is over, but the work continues.