Dear ZARC Hereby we wish to notify you that Complaint 520952 (Petsplaceza.co.za) submitted and acknowledged by you on 2024-01-24 has become moot. The scammer decided to abandon this domain six months after being reported to you, sadly also after twelve known victims.
Artists Against 419 has to say this very clearly: There can be no consumer privacy and security while ICANN Registrars are the custodians of trust on the internet. ICANN has allowed a situation to develop that’s had the exact opposite effect of what the European privacy regulators aimed for, the protection of natural consumer privacy. In turn, this has further not only created a situation where consumers may be trivially deprived of privacy, but also security. Let’s look at this situation with quick examples.
While rumors abound of a chap in red clothes sneaking around, silently slipping presents into houses under Christmas trees for the children, other rumors were spreading. Somebody had preceded Santa. Krampus had arrived. He’s been quite busy for a while now doing, of all things, cyber inspections!
BEC (Business Email Compromise) has gained more and more attention lately. Most recent statistics show $26 billion in losses the past three years. The sad reality is that BEC could have been avoidable if Advance Fee Fraud (AFF) had been recognized earlier as the threat it is and dealt with appropriately. Inaction on basic levels, despite alerts for the past 16 years from Artists Against 419, allowed these actors to escalate to unknown heights. BEC is the end product of…
While ICANN, the regulators and the various interest groups are debating the definitions of DNS abuse, what constitutes a security threat and is within their responsibility (or rather not), what’s wrong in this area, fraudsters don’t care about these shenanigans. They’re exploiting DNS to their own advantage in well defined illegal activities. The rules made when the Internet was young, seems unable to keep the steps with current realities. The divide between the ideal Internet in the regulators’ model and…
On the 20th of Jan 2018 we sent an email to Tucows and the reseller SmarterASP on domains used for websites selling both legitimate and forged passports, visas, drivers licenses etc. They also claimed to sell forged currency. The reality is this is a well known scam used by Cameroonian fraudsters. Invariably these lead to later extortion where the fraudsters impersonate the authorities and fees/fines are payable.
ICANN had two complaints they closed, escalated back to them last week. One was a Registrar Standards complaint, one was regarding a rogue reseller proxy at the registrar which is the subject of the first complaint. Why? What happens where we have a registrar that serially accepts and has been accepting weak unverified registration details, for at least the past four years into the registries, in violation of the ICANN RAA and this leads to mass abuse? What happens if…