auDA Gives Scammers Another Smack

Congratulations again to the Policy Compliance team at auDA (led by Mark Bouck).

They have vigilantly followed up complaints of “Unauthorised Business Use” – UBU’s for short. This is where scammers use someone else’s identity and ABN to buy .au domain names that have just expired. More details on this type of activity can be found on this article.

Following my last complaint to Mark, I received this follow up email from him on Friday (and I publish it with his consent):

Hello Ned,

auDA Complaint Ref: C171225

I can confirm that the 824 domain names below have now been deleted with a further 19 that have not yet been actioned and I’m chasing those up with the registrars.

Please note that the total from this batch was actually 843, rather than the 869 previously stated, as there were some legitimate domain names that had been incorrectly identified.

We expect to have the first 5,000 of the large batch that you provided sent out this afternoon and I expect that there will likely be at least 2 more batches of that size still to go out to the registrar for warranty checks.

Thank you again for assisting with these and I’ll send a further email relating to this complaint reference number once I’ve heard back from the registrars on the remaining 19.

UBU List 1 auDA

Regards,
Mark
Mark Bouck
Manager Policy Compliance
.au Domain Administration Ltd

Further Complaints

If you have been affected personally; or if you know of some scam sites, please get in touch with Mark and his team at auDA. Or if you don’t want to be “the complainant” because of privacy issues, please let me know, and I’ll make the complaint.

The more scammers we can eradicate, the better.

Unfortunately though, as I wrote previously, these scammers can potentially make so much money in even a week, so strong and decisive action is required:

♦  These sites need to be suspended or shut down immediately auDA becomes aware of them.

♦  To delay just 7 days means that the scammers would have probably more than covered their registration cost e.g. sale of one pair of shoes or sunglasses.

♦  Look at the common denominators – Public Domain Registry; Tucows, nameservers of ns1.alidns.com, and suspect email addresses – @163.com seems very popular for these scammers.

But this is a fantastic start auDA – so well done.

Ned O’Meara – 5th June 2017