Many Domains Registered With False Data

bakotaco writes "According to research carried out by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) many domain owners are hiding their true identity. The findings could mean that many websites are fronts for spammers, phishing gangs and other net criminals. The report also found that measures to improve information about domain owners were not proving effective." From the article: "The GAO took 300 random domain names from each of the .com, .org and .net registries and looked up the centrally held information about their owners. Any user can look up this data via one of the many whois sites on the net. The report found that owner data for 5.14% of the domains it looked at was clearly fake as it used phone numbers such as (999) 999-9999; listed nonsense addresses such as 'asdasdasd' or used invalid zip codes such as 'XXXXX'. In a further 3.65% of domain owner records data was missing or incomplete in one or more fields."

Comments

Been running into this for years

[cprael]

Including the spammer who was trying to forge email from my domain a few years ago. Registered his domain with a non-existent yahoomail account, amongst other false data. Backed off when I lit up the yahoo account and seized control of his domain.

You Think?

[TechJones]

Maybe some people just want to be Anonymous Cowards.

Will the phone calls/letters ever stop!

[saboola]

I happen to be at the home of (999)999-9999 on asdasdasd street in XXXXX area code and I get so much junk mail/telemarketing calls you would not believe it.