On Tuesday, May 27, 2003, at 08:42 PM, Keith Davidson wrote:
I received a couple of spam snail mails today from "Domain Registry of America" Melbourne, Australia, offering me the opportunity to renew a couple of my .com names with them at an extremely generous AUS$48 per year, and also to buy the equivalent names in .biz and .info.
Obviously they're "yet another" pack of spammers who have trolled the .com whois and are seeking to make a buck out of it.
But the interesting point is that when I do a whois on their domain, I get a message as follows:
"Status: PROTECTED Note: To help prevent malicious domain hijacking and domain transfer errors, the registrar has protected the registrant of this domain name registrant by locking it. Any attempted transfers will be denied at the registry until the registrant requests otherwise. The registrant for the name may unlock the name at any time at the current registrar in order for a transfer initiation to succeed
Isn't it somewhat ironic that these spammers seek to hide behind a veil of confidentiality, while freely using my information against me??
The "protected" status has nothing to do with their WHOIS registrant info which is freely available: Registrant Contact- Domain Registry of America Domain Registrar (registrar(a)droa.com) +1.8664340212 FAX- +1.8664340211 2316 Delaware Avenue, Suite 266 Buffalo, NY 14216-2687 US The status just shows that the domain is locked at the registry (by the Registrar) to prevent possible unauthorised hijacking. To see an example of a domain where the Registrant has provided ZERO information in the WHOIS, you have to check out names like dietk.com and dietkazaa.com: **** Registrant Contact: , - US **** DROA, IIRC, has been slapped by the FTC before, but that still hasn't stopped them. eNom could do something about it, but they're climbing up the Registrar charts, possibly due to DROA's success at duping people into moving their domains to eNom, so it's all good business for them.
What, if anything, should ICANN be doing to stop these spammers?
What, if anything, makes you think that ICANN cares?