Nic, it is very bizarre that someone would be using authorizen.net as and endpoint. I still think it is nothing to worry about. Companies buy domain names to catch typos of their primary domain. Authoriz.net also redirects to their homepage.
There are a few reasons a company might do this. The big one being that someone else could piggy back on their name and reputation and use it to capture traffic. In the worst case scenario the parasitic domain owner harms the customers. In the other case it’s just a numbers game to get customers for legitimate services/products.
Look at the number of views the posts on here get. This is a very well known company. In whatever time period it takes for 100,000 to visit the site, how many of those 100,000 are going to accidentally type an extra n? If it’s 1% that’s better than most websites get. So companies swoop up these domains.
As for the server in Montenegro, authorize does business all over Europe. Not quite such a massive red flag as it first sounds. Europe is small and hosting companies there I’m sure have servers throughout.
The other big thing is that this is used as an endpoint, not a bogus customer facing payment form. If someone bought this domain, I imagine it would have cost a lot, and to monetize it in this manner they would have to get people to go and alter script files of business owners. It sounds like a very costly thing to do. In college we watched a documentary on CC info theft, and stolen CC numbers are ridiculously cheap. So why not be a front facing scammer and syphon traffic, instead of having to pay or entice people to get behind the scenes of real businesses? It just doesn’t make sense to me, although this whole thing is just downright bizarre, especially now that we’ve got a new one chiming in.
For sure that payment for needs to be yanked. I would really be interested in an authorize employee chiming in for who really owns that domain. This is really puzzling and now I’m interested.