Vacation Rental Fraud Report
Original weekly data from Bikoosh's monitoring of public Certificate Transparency logs: how many newly-certified domains match the naming patterns used in vacation-rental fraud. Aggregates only - patterns, not accusations.
In the week of 2026-09-21, 1391 newly-certified domains matched vacation-rental fraud naming patterns, out of 14,356,555 certificates observed in public Certificate Transparency logs - one in every 10,321.
Which patterns fired
| Pattern | Domains |
|---|---|
| vocab+tld | 1236 |
| brand | 155 |
Top-level domains of suspicious matches
| TLD | Domains |
|---|---|
| .shop | 489 |
| .site | 373 |
| .top | 159 |
| .online | 126 |
| .xyz | 54 |
| .com | 51 |
| .au | 32 |
| .club | 29 |
| .dev | 14 |
| .net | 12 |
Trend
| Week | Certificates observed | Pattern matches |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-21 | 14,356,555 | 1391 |
| 2026-09-14 | 71,255,574 | 6547 |
| 2026-09-07 | 73,537,142 | 5917 |
| 2026-08-31 | 81,530,767 | 4451 |
| 2026-08-24 | 79,185,184 | 5299 |
| 2026-08-17 | 64,942,253 | 7625 |
| 2026-08-10 | 54,504,000 | 3691 |
| 2026-08-03 | 3,095,475 | 280 |
Weekly archive - the time series
Every week is a permanent, citable page; together they form a week-over-week series on rental-fraud domain patterns.
- Week of 2026-09-21 1391 suspicious · 14,356,555 certs
- Week of 2026-09-14 6547 suspicious · 71,255,574 certs
- Week of 2026-09-07 5917 suspicious · 73,537,142 certs
- Week of 2026-08-31 4451 suspicious · 81,530,767 certs
- Week of 2026-08-24 5299 suspicious · 79,185,184 certs
- Week of 2026-08-17 7625 suspicious · 64,942,253 certs
- Week of 2026-08-10 3691 suspicious · 54,504,000 certs
- Week of 2026-08-03 280 suspicious · 3,095,475 certs
Methodology
Bikoosh subscribes to the public Certificate Transparency stream - the log of all newly-issued HTTPS certificates. Each new domain name is tested against deterministic naming rules associated with rental fraud: rental vocabulary combined with destination city names, brand-lookalike patterns (typosquats, hyphen injection), and rental vocabulary on TLDs with high historical abuse rates. Matching is on names only at this stage; a name match is a statistical signal, not a verdict about any specific domain - which is why this report publishes only aggregates and never names domains.
Numbers regenerate weekly from live pipeline data. Weeks run Monday-Sunday, UTC.
Subscribe to the weekly report
Pull it into any reader - RSS or JSON feed - or get it by email (one message per weekly publish, double opt-in, unsubscribe in every send):
Cite this report
Bikoosh Vacation Rental Fraud Report, week of 2026-09-21. bikoosh.com/fraud-report/latest. Licensed CC BY 4.0 - reuse with attribution.
BibTeX
@misc{bikoosh_fraud_2026_09_21,
title = {Vacation Rental Fraud Report, week of 2026-09-21},
author = {{Bikoosh}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://bikoosh.com/fraud-report/2026-09-21}},
note = {Weekly aggregate counts of newly-certified domains matching
vacation-rental fraud naming patterns, from public Certificate
Transparency logs. Licensed CC BY 4.0.}
}
Questions or data requests: [email protected]