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DojUK.legal is a website that supposedly represents a UK-based organization called the ‘Department of Justice, Child Pornography’. We were recently contacted by someone who received a threatening letter from the organization. The letter claimed that they had detected child pornography on the electronic device of the recipient. The letter goes on to say that the recipient will be arrested and face prison unless they pay a fine of €580 within 10 days.
This seems to be a case of an Extortion Scam as the letter contains spelling errors such as ‘coditional’ instead of ‘conditional’. It is also not believable that a government agency will be willing to drop serious charges such as child porn possession by simply accepting a fine.
While the website indirectly implies that it is operated by a department of the UK Government, this is clearly not the case due to the following reasons:
A simple online search reveals that the UK has no department called ‘Department of Justice’. It appears that DojUK.legal is trying to impersonate a legitimate government organization called the Ministry of Justice. They have even created a similar logo.
Another obvious indication that DojUK.legal has no affiliation to the UK Government is that real UK government websites have the extension ‘.gov.uk’ and not other extensions such as ‘.legal’.
The domain name registration information reveals that it has been registered on 19th January 2022 through a domain registrar based in France. This would never be the case for a website operated by the UK Government. Also, the domain name has been registered only for a year.
DojUK.legal’s website is quite odd as it appears to have been created by people who lack website design skills and have a poor grasp of English. The website contains several broken links and the content is nonsensical.
For example, the website mentions that ‘child sexual abuse’ is their preferred term over terms such as ‘child pornography’, even though the department’s name itself contains the term ‘child pornography’. Also notice the mispelling of the word ‘usually’ in the screenshot below.
I found that the content on DojUK.legal has been copied from the website of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). This is an enormous red flag as no genuine organization would plagiarize content for their website.
The website’s footer has a section that is oddly titled ‘Collaboration Departments’ and contains broken links to various UK Government organizations.
Even though the website clearly did not exist before January 2022, the footer of the website states that it has been active since 2021. This is blatantly false.
The following contact details are given on the website:
The address given does not match that of the Ministry of Justice and upon looking up the location on Google Maps there is nothing to suggest that the ‘Department of Justice’ has an office there.
A lookup of the phone numbers revealed that they are actually operated from Kolkata, India. This is confirmed by the fact that DojUK.legal states that the numbers are operated by call centre staff.
DojUK.legal has no social media presence. There are no reviews for the website written anywhere online either, which is not surprising considering that it is a brand new website.
Taking all the above facts into consideration, there are several reasons to believe that DojUK.legal is likely to be a fake UK government website operated by Extortion scammers. If you have been contacted by anyone claiming to be from the ‘Department of Justice’ accusing you of possessing child pornography, it would be wise to ignore the threats as it is most likely an attempt to scam you.
This article has been written by a scam fighter volunteer. If you believe the article above contains inaccuracies or is missing relevant information, please contact ScamAdviser.com using this form.
