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A quarter of registrar’s names are “illicit pharmacies”

Kevin Murphy, January 16, 2015, Domain Services

One in four of the domain names registered with the registrar NetLynx are linked to current, past or potential future rogue drug sites, according to online pharmacy monitor LegitScript.
The Mumbai-based registrar was hit with a breach notice by ICANN Compliance last week, over an alleged failure to investigate an abuse complaint about a single customer domain, tnawsol24h.com.
NetLynx did not adequately respond to ICANN’s calls from November 26 to January 5, according to the notice (pdf).
While ICANN did not identify the source or nature of the complaint, according to LegitScript it was filed by the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and it claimed that the domain was being used as a “rogue internet pharmacy”.
LegitScript did some research into NetLynx’s domains under management and now claims that it is not an isolated case.
Company president John Horton blogged:

at least a quarter of the registrar’s business is dependent on rogue Internet pharmacy registrations, with roughly 3,000 of the 12,000 domain names under the registrar’s portfolio taggable as current, past or “holding sites” for illicit online pharmacies.

Horton clarified for DI that the 3,000 number is extrapolated from the fact that LegitScript managed to categorize 1,820 out of the 7,000 NetLynx domains it could find as problematic.
Of those, 820 were “online and active” rogue pharmacies, he said. He gave canadian-drug-pharmacy.com, pills-delivery.net and pillsforlife.net as examples.
Another 780 were hosting rogue pharmacies in the past but have since been shut down, he said.
Finally, LegitScript categorized 220 as “meeting known patterns” for “holding sites” where illicit pharmacies may be launched in future. Horton said:

many of the spam pharma organizations use “holding domain names” (not all are online at any one time), so if the website was NOT currently online, we looked to a variety of data — known domain name patterns, screenshots, known rogue name servers, known rogue IP addresses, etc. — to determine the likelihood that a domain name is likely to be a rogue Internet pharmacy, and gave NetLynx the benefit of the doubt if there was any lack of certainty

LegitScript classifies online pharmacies as “rogue” if they offer to ship medicines without a prescription to people in jurisdictions where prescriptions are required.
Horton is now calling for ICANN to look into terminating NetLynx’s accreditation.