ICANN terminates penis pill pimp registrar
ICANN is to terminate the contract of a Chinese registrar linked to dodgy pharmaceuticals web sites and other malfeasance.
Nanjing Imperiosus Technology Co, which does business as DomainersChoice.com, has been told it will lose its registrar accreditation February 3.
ICANN said in the termination notice that the company had failed to keep records related to abuse reports, failed to validate Whois records, and failed to provide ICANN with registration records, all in breach of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement.
The breaches related to complaints filed by illegal pharmacy watchdog LegitScript last September, I believe.
DomainersChoice and its CEO Stefan Hansmann were listed in Whois as the owners of potentially hundreds of domains that were being used to sell medicines for conditions ranging from heart disease to erectile dysfunction.
The domains 5mg-cialis20mg.com, acheterdutadalafil.com, viagra-100mgbestprice.net and 100mgviagralowestprice.net were among those apparently owned by the registrar.
According to LegitScript, thousands of DomainersChoice domains were “rogue internet pharmacies”.
The registrar has also been linked by security researchers to mass typosquatting campaigns.
The company’s web site even has a typo generator. While one could argue such tools are also useful to brand owners, DomainersChoice’s name suggests it’s geared towards domainers, not brands.
DomainersChoice had about 27,000 domains under management at the last count, which ICANN will now migrate to another registrar.
It’s not known how many of those were self-registered domains and how many were being used nefariously, but LegitScript CEO John Horton estimated (pdf) at least 2,300 dodgy pharma sites used the registrar.
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