Australia'scorporate regulator is building a public list of the website addresses used bylicensed financial firms, giving consumers a way to tell a real broker or superfund apart from a scam clone. TheAustralian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) said today (Wednesday)it is collecting the web addresses of Australian financial services licenseesand publishing them on its Professional Registers Search, a free databaseanyone can check.The movetargets a problem that has grown alongside online investing. Criminalsincreasingly copy the names, license numbers and websites of genuine licenseesto stand up fake sites and run investment scam ads that look authentic,according to the regulator.A Whitelist Approach AfterYears of TakedownsThis is ashift in tactics. For the past two years ASIC has focused on tearing scam sitesdown, removing more than 10,000 fraudulentpages at a clip of around 130 a week under a takedown capability launched in 2023.Publishinga verified list of legitimate addresses flips that logic. Rather than chasingfakes after they surface, the regulator wants to give the public a referencepoint for what the real thing looks like.More than6,500 licensees have been invited to submit their website details since theprogram started in early May, ASIC said. It aims to load most of the addresseswithin the coming months.Theregister will show a licensee's principal website and any additional sites,whether a firm operates no website at all, or whether it has not yet handedover its details, according to the regulator. Consumers can search by companyname, ABN, ACN or license number.ASIC has been pushed in this direction partly byrepeated impersonation of its own brand. The watchdog warned in October that scammers werecloning its Moneysmart consumer site to harvest personal details. Since late2023, roughly 20% of new Moneysmart investor alert listings have involvedsomeone impersonating a licensee, an authorized representative or a registeredcompany.Regulators Worldwide Leanon Their Own RegistersASIC is notthe only regulator pointing consumers back to an official register as the firstline of defense. The approach has become a standard counter to clone firms,fraudsters who lift the name, registration number and address of an authorizedbusiness to look legitimate.In theUnited Kingdom, the Financial Conduct Authority routinely tells investors tocheck its Financial Services Register and has issued a steady run of clonealerts naming real brands. It flagged a clone impersonating thelisted broker XTB,warning the public to verify a firm's credentials before sending any money.Europeoffers more aggressive versions of the same idea. Regulators in Cyprus, Spainand Italy publish blacklists of fraudulent and cloned sites, and Italy's Consobcan block access to them at the domain level. ASICborrowed from that playbook last year when it gained the power to pull investmentscam ads from social media.What setsthe new register apart is the direction of travel. Most of those programscatalog the bad actors, while ASIC is trying to assemble a complete inventoryof the good ones. The wageris that a verified whitelist is harder for scammers to defeat than a blacklistthat is always a step behind the next domain.Compulsory Powers on theTableParticipationis voluntary for now, and ASIC has signaled that could change."Wemay consider using compulsory powers to achieve a complete register, ifrequired," ASIC Commissioner Alan Kirkland said.Theregulator is also leaning on public pressure, encouraging consumers to ask anylicensee whose address is missing why it has not signed up. Authorizedrepresentatives are not covered by the initiative, though licensees can posttheir own verification information for them.ASIC'srecord suggests it is willing to escalate. The regulator took down more than 2,500 investmentscam and phishing sites in the first months after launching its takedown unit, and the volumehas climbed steadily since.Scam Losses Top A$248Million in a QuarterThe numbersbehind the push are sizable. Scamwatch and ReportCyber logged a combined 60,657scam reports in the first three months of 2026, with reported losses of A$248.3million, according to ASIC. Theagency's broader enforcement load has grown too, with the watchdog removing nearly 7,000 scam sites asactions jumped 50%in its last reporting year.Alongsidethe register, ASIC has rolled out online resources for businesses that havebeen impersonated, pulling its scam alerts, disruption work and enforcementrecords into one place.Whether thelist dents those losses will hinge on how many firms take part and how widelyconsumers and platforms actually use it. ASIC said it wants digital and socialmedia platforms to fold the register into how they vet financial advertising, astep that would push its reach well beyond individual investors checking a siteby hand.This article was written by Damian Chmiel at www.financemagnates.com.