I think the lack of actual building suite/street address in the email signature in the very first email would have immediately made me extremely suspicious. That's about as good as "Totally real business address, trust me bro, Singapore".

Also some kind of company main phone number in an email sig is a thing I'm expecting, even if it almost certainly goes to an IVR system, or the email sig doesn't have an extension number in it. But if a person is reaching out to me with a hand crafted email I'm also going to consider them a bit more suspiciously if there's no phone contact in the email sig.

Further, .xyz or similar as a company domain name is pretty damn suspicious when, for example, luaventures.net isn't taken as a domain name. 99% of the time when I see .xyz it's spam/scam/phishing disposable domains.

----------------

edit: looks like the website still exists: https://www.luaventures.xyz/ (open in sandbox, do not download anything, caution, etc!)

Googling luaventures.xyz turns up all sorts of weird things.

The C2 IP mentioned in the writeup appears to be a /24 of some small hosting company in the UAE.

inetnum: 89.124.107.0 - 89.124.107.255 netname: VDSINA country: NL geofeed: https://vdsina.com/geofeed_as216071.csv geoloc: 52.309711 4.935438 admin-c: SK15998-RIPE tech-c: SK15998-RIPE status: ASSIGNED PA mnt-by: servers-tech-mnt created: 2025-11-12T07:06:42Z last-modified: 2025-11-12T07:06:42Z source: RIPE

role: SERVERS TECH FZCO address: UNITED ARAB EMIRATES address: Dubai address: 336469 address: Ifza Business Park DDP, Building 1, office number 36298-001 nic-hdl: SK15998-RIPE mnt-by: lir-ae-servers-tech-1-MNT created: 2023-10-25T09:55:18Z last-modified: 2024-07-10T12:05:37Z source: RIPE # Filtered

% Information related to '89.124.107.0/24AS216071'

route: 89.124.107.0/24 origin: AS216071 mnt-by: servers-tech-mnt created: 2025-11-12T07:08:49Z last-modified: 2025-11-12T07:08:49Z source: RIPE

North Korean hackers used fake video calls in $400M crypto hack, says FBI