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Registrar threatened with shutdown for failing to reveal registrant

Kevin Murphy, November 9, 2011, 10:00:43 (UTC), Domain Registrars

ICANN has told a Turkish domain name registrar that its accreditation will be terminated unless it fixes its apparently shoddy Whois services.
While Alantron has a track record of Whois failures and connections to abusive domains, ICANN’s threat appears to have been made in connection with a single domain name.
ICANN compliance director Stacey Burnette wrote to Alantron (pdf):

On 12 October 2011, ICANN requested that Alantron make registration records available to ICANN concerning a specific domain name, as ICANN received a complaint that there was no Whois output available for the domain name. Although numerous requests were made by ICANN to make the registration records available for inspection and copying, as of the date of this letter, Alantron has not made any arrangements to comply with ICANN’s request.

The letter also details Alantron’s alleged failures to make Whois available through Port 43 and its web interface going back to September 1.
ICANN has also threatened to suspend Alantron’s ability to create new registrations. Alantron received a similar de-accreditation warning for Whois failures in April 2010.
It does not say who made the complaint or which domain is in question, but the company has come under fire from security pros in the past for allowing its services to be abused to push fake pharmaceuticals.
Alantron, which has about 26,000 domains under management according to Webhosting.info, has until November 25 to rectify the problem.

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Comments (2)

  1. Roger says:

    The domain was PriceWire.com and I am the one that reported Alantron.com for stealing the domain from my account and transferring ownership to over 50 randomly generated “owners” in a 24 hour period in an attempt to bury the Whois information and hide it from ICANN. I purchased PriceWire.com at a premium after market price and THEN AlanTron stole the domain from my account. They sold thousands of domains in BATCHES to http://domainnamesales.com BEFORE they were made available to the public… this is how these huge domain name auction houses acquire so many premium domains, they make shady underhanded deals with third world registrars to by domains before they are available to the public.
    domainnamesales.com won’t sell the domain to me for under $25,000…. and THAT is what all of this is about… acquiring millions of dollars worth of domains from shady registrars.
    I reported them to ICANN hoping to get my domain back but ICANN has no REAL authority. ICANN is worthless when it comes to domain name disputes even when one of their own accredited registrars steals a domain and it is reported immediately ICANN “can’t” do anything… or won’t.
    It is very hard to get a straight answer from ICANN regarding any disputes. I have asked dozens of times what the outcome would be and if I would ever get my domain name back and NEVER once got a straight answer from them.
    See the final notice here:
    http://www.icann.org/en/compliance/notices/
    Lesson learned…
    Don’t ever purchase a domain from a registrar that is NOT in the country you are in… you have no legal recourse if the registrar steals a domain from your account… and they DO IT..
    If you need any further information please feel free to contact me at the email provided.

  2. Hamit says:

    That is shame…

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