How we uncovered the identity of popular spyware makers
> The UK address. 145-157 St John Street, London, EC1V 4PY. According to a BBC report, this is the address used by a company which sells its use as a registered office address. Because there does not seem to be an obligation to check that users of the service are legitimate companies, criminals are attracted to it. According to the BBC, the address is in common use among fake companies operating "boiler room" fake share scams.<p>That is the old address for Companies Made Simple: <a href="http://www.companiesmadesimple.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.companiesmadesimple.com/</a><p>They handle all kinds of services for tens of thousands of companies in the UK, from registration, to registered address and mail forwarding.<p>I know this, because I used them for my startup to handle the registered address. This is because official mail has to go somewhere and the address is a matter of public record. We were in a co-working space at the time and knew that we would move on when the time came, it's an annoyance to go around updating the registered address and unprofessional to have a co-working space as one.<p>That Companies Made Simple is used by bad actors isn't going to be a surprise, bad actors use nearly all service providers.<p>They are the largest provider of registered address services in the UK, it's not a surprise that the address is in "common use". That ignores the fact that the number of legitimate businesses that use the address vastly outnumber the illegitimate.<p>I dislike Companies Made Simple having used them (they nearly shredded our investors SEIS certs because they didn't regard them as "official government communication"), but it's probably defamation to imply that companies using the address are not legitimate just because some small sample of them are not.