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US Court Disconnects Canadian Domain Name Scammers
coondoggie writes "A US District Court today ordered a halt to the illegal practice of Canadian companies who the Federal Trade Commission said deceptively posed as domain name registrars and sent bogus bills to thousands of US small businesses and nonprofit organizations for their annual 'Website Address Listing.' The FTC said many of the businesses believed they would lose their Web site addresses unless they paid the bill, so they paid but in most cases the defendants did not provide domain registration services, did not provide the 'search optimization' services it claimed to provide, and bilked small businesses and nonprofits out of millions of dollars."
The US Court sure the hell has jurisdiction in the US, where the crimes took place.
Au contraire. If the Canadian companies are scamming US companies by using the US postal service, you can bet that the court has jurisdiction to order them to stop.
If they don't stop, they will be in contempt. Any assets that ever enter the US can be seized. And I suspect that Canada would be more than happy to enforce the contempt judgment.
Because the targets of the scam are in the US and the US mail is being used, the court has all the jurisdiction it needs. To check this, see the Supreme Court's decision in Asahi Metal Industries Co. (1987), holding that a foreign product manufacturer could be dragged into US court if it foresaw that its products would be used in the US. This case is even stronger -- the Canadian scammers intended their scam to reach the US.
..and if folks RTFA there is mention of all sorts of Canadian government and police agencies being involved in this already.
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