How to shut down a scam site

I posted on here 11 days ago about being scammed out of a small amount of ETH. I should've taken action further than just warning you guys about the scam I fell victim to, and I now have, and I thought it might be useful to share with you what I did exactly to shut down the site that scammed me.

In short, I received an email 12 days ago, ostensibly from the NFT marketplace Mintable. The email stated that I was eligible to claim a free NFT - that all I needed to do was visit the Mintable site, connect my wallet, and claim my NFT. I have an account on Mintable, and the email addressed me by the username of that account, a username I have used nowhere else, so it seemed trustworthy. I clicked the link in the email, and landed on what appeared to be Mintable's site, with modal overlaid instructing me to connect my wallet to claim my NFT. I connected my MetaMask and initiated the transaction to claim my NFT. In so doing, I lost the (thankfully) small amount of ETH I had in that particular wallet, and, needless to say, did not gain a free NFT. It was only after the fact that I realised I was on app-mintable.app, as opposed to mintable.app, and that the email I had received came from a sketchy looking gmail address, rather than from Mintable themselves.

After posting on here about the incident, I largely forgot about it, until another redditor messaged me to ask whether I'd heard back from Mintable, as this user, too, had received the scammy email that I had. I have emailed Mintable several times since I was scammed to ask how my personal information found its way into the hands of the scammer responsible, I've heard nothing back.

But this redditor's message spurred me to action. Here's what I did:

I looked up the WHOIS record for app-mintable.app; I did this from my Mac terminal by typing in whois app-mintable.app, but there are numerous websites you can use to look up WHOIS records, too.

A WHOIS record essentially identifies who owns a domain name, and how to get in touch with them, and typically lists various email addresses pertaining to the domain name - an administrative contact, a technical contact, and, crucially, a registrar abuse contact. It's really only that last address that you need, but I emailed every address that I found in the WHOIS record for the site in question, and told how I, and others, had lost money to this site, and explained that it was masquerading as a legitimate site (mintable.app) in order to con people out of cryptocurrency.

I heard back, a few hours later, from the registrar of the domain, in this case Google, who thanked me for contacting them, and to say that they were looking into it. As of a few hours after that, if you try to visit app-mintable.app, you will find that the site is no longer accessible.

There is, of course, every chance that this website will appear again, under a slightly different domain name, but at least I've set the scammers back, and hopefully saved a few others from losing money. If I receive another such email in the future, I will be more proactive and immediately take the necessary steps to have the site shut down. If we could all be a little more proactive in this way, we can make the crypto space safer, and, by extension, encourage adoption.

Thanks for attending my TED talk.