If you google the domain it looks like it was compromised by some guy who owns the instagram account mwr and goes by 'SLNTAR' as seen in a mirror of the website from May 18 2018. It looks like the owner of the website has regained control but it's possible the website is still under the attackers control.
Considering that the domain is still being used as a phishing site to steal login credentials, I would say whoever currently is in control of the domain is the culprit. They probably were using a vulnerable version of some publicly available software which then allowed someone to upload a shell to the website. The owner then likely probably set the entire website to the current default page as a remedy to the problem. If the vulnerable software in question was something like an online store to sell their kitchen hardware, they could have deleted that but the shell could have given them SSH access to the entire system or worse. The alternative is the website could have been vulnerable to some other remote exploit due to outdated server software which would mean the attackers still got SSH access and owned the server.
By your logic, a bunch of Vietnamese kitchen hardware dealers (who own a physical building apparently???) are using their own website which was hacked at least once before to scam people. The business is registered in Vietnam and it's listed on their Facebook page and on the domain registration so I think it'd be a little dumb for them to use that as a platform if the culprit was they themselves.
The phishing pages aren't extremely sophisticated but by the looks of it they were probably created from scratch or using a program and the ICO page has an advanced mechanism that a.) only allows 1 registration per IP to prohibit bot spamming or the like and b.) requires passwords of 8 characters. The website also uses fairly good English and punctuation which it is evident the owner of the website or whoever is operating their social media does not have.
The person who executed the scam seems technologically savvy and is at least familiar with the English language which it doesn't appear the people at Maxpara are. All evidence points to the website being used by external people to run their scam to avoid getting caught. Someone who is smart enough to code their own phishing page that shows a relative familiarity with computer programming probably isn't using their own domain name with no whois protection to run a scam. It'd be funny if it actually was Vietnamese kitchen dealers but unfortunately if it's probably not
Quoting this post, 0nc3forg0tt3n had also pretended to be another CL user so they may be related, or they may be another person.
In any case, the email communications of the maxpara phisher did not demonstrate solid English. English is definitely a very second language for them; there is no reason for them to use broken english while trying to pretend to be me and communicate with a CL user.
