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ICANN hacked to promote crypto scam

Kevin Murphy, February 12, 2025, Domain Policy

ICANN’s Twitter account appeared to be hacked briefly last night, and was used to promote what looks like a pump-and-dump cryptocurrency scam.

A series of tweets from the official @ICANN account plugged a memecoin named $DNS from around 0200 UTC today, just when ICANN’s California crew would have been clocking off for the day.

“2025: The Internet Gets Its Own Currency. @icann is redefining digital ownership with $DNS – the first memecoin to merge domain governance & Web3 culture,” one of the tweets read, according to a screen capture from domain lawyer John Berryhill.

The posts linked to dnscoin.org, which at the time was a live web site promoting “$DNS. Own the Internet Again. ICANN’s decentralized memecoin for domain governance”, according to what little remains visible in Google’s index.

The domain, which had been registered for years, has already been deleted entirely. Not suspended. It’s just gone.

ICANN seems to have restored control over its Twitter account fairly quickly, but Berryhill’s caps show the scam tweets were viewed by at least a couple thousand of @ICANN’s 104,000 followers.

The apparent scam appears to be either a modern-day pump-and-dump scheme, where investors hype up a crypto coin only to cash out when its value peaks, or what crypto investors call a “rug pull”, which is more akin to straightforward theft.

Either way, it seems possible that some people may have lost some money, and ICANN’s not-great reputation for security has certainly suffered another embarrassing setback.

It seems likely that @ICANN either had a weak password, or somebody with access to the account got their device compromised in some way.

ICANN, no doubt sifting through the evidence this morning, has yet to publish an official statement.

NamesCon hotel “scam” doing the rounds

Kevin Murphy, November 9, 2015, Domain Services

A company with a track record of misleading conference attendees into booking hotels with higher fees appears to be targeting NamesCon.
This morning I received a phone call from somebody claiming to be from NamesCon, but he pronounced it “Name Escon”.
I asked him what company he worked for, and he continued to insist he worked for “Name Escon”.
So I indulged him for a while, and it turned out he was trying to book me into a Las Vegas hotel for the duration of the January 10-13 trade show.
He offered me a rate at the Tropicana of $99 per night, including breakfast. That’s actually not a bad rate — about $20 less than what Expedia is currently asking.
I kept him on the phone until he sent an email to an address he had on file for me (the one from DI’s About page, which I don’t use to sign up for anything).
It arrived immediately, from Exhibitors Housing Services (ehshousing.com), which appears to be a Los Angeles company, with a link to housing-portal.com.
The link led to a credit card authorization form, pre-tailored to my details and the rate offered, which included some terms and conditions I didn’t like the look of.
A simple web search revealed that the company is widely believed to be Bad News.
The same outfit appears to regularly target annual conferences using the exhibitor lists published on earlier conference web sites. Contact information appears to be taken from the exhibitor’s own site.
According to the likes of Affiliate Summit and The Physiological Society, and the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners and the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association these guys may charge up-front processing fees and/or have a very unfavorable cancellation policy.
In fact, just Googling for “Exhibitors Housing Services” will return pretty much nothing but scam warnings from various conference organizers.
One chap even posted a YouTube video explaining what he thinks the scam is.
I’m pretty certain the company has nothing to do with NamesCon.

New domain scam? ICANN issues vague warning

Kevin Murphy, July 16, 2014, Domain Services

ICANN has warned internet users about a domain name scam that exploits the ICANN name and logo.
Not giving away much information, ICANN said in a statement:

It has been brought to ICANN’s attention that some online entities have attempted to sell fraudulent “certificates”, which they claim are required to protect generic top-level domain names. The perpetuators of this scam threaten registrants on the protection service with the objective of securing a fee from the registrant. The “certificates” look official and include an unauthorized use of the ICANN logo.
Please note that ICANN does not issue certificates to registrants and does not collect fees from registrants directly.

It’s not clear whether the scam is related to the “ICANN certificates” fraudsters sometimes demand as part of domain appraisal scams, which have been well-documented online.
The reference to a “protection service” and new gTLDs suggest this might be something new.
I asked ICANN for a sample of the scam in question yesterday but haven’t heard back yet.
UPDATE: The certificates look like this:

and this: