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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."
A federal district court judge in Chicago, Robert M. Dow, Jr., ordered a halt to the deceptive claims and froze the defendants' assets held in the United States, pending trial. The FTC will seek a permanent halt to the scheme and ask the court to order redress to victimized consumers.
Lesson is? Don't store money in the US if you are (allegedly) committing crimes in the US.
I'm trying to get outraged but the US only affected US assets. Something within its Jurisdiction.
There are two issues here. The US still controls the DNS servers, and Canada is part of NAFTA which forces them to comply with certain trade restrictions. Canadian courts could theoretically block this ruling and override the DNS change, but there is about a 0% chance of that happening. What is likely is that the US courts operated faster than the Canadian courts with this issue. I expect to see the Canadian courts charging these people with fraud in the next couple of months.
Except that the US Government regulates interstate and international trade within the borders of the USA. So, an international mail fraud that takes place inside the USA (US businesses received fraudulent letters and withdrew money from their US banks to pay in US currency), the government will enforce as much of its law as possible. It will also probably attempt to have the perps in Canada extradited to be tried in the USA for fraud/etc.
This is where extradition comes in.
If the US asks for the Canadian gov to hand over the criminals and the Canadian gov agrees that they are in fact criminals, then they'll get shipped off and charged in the US for breaking US law.
The same can happen in reverse.
MABASPLOOM!
Actually, given that a profitable amount of people believe they are communicating with Nigerian royalty this scam was pure gold. I mean, they went through the trouble of masquerading as the specific registrar. Too bad (?) they didn't cover their tracks better.
Long ago, we used to get official-looking bills for listings in a worldwide Telex directory, for several hundred dollars a year. They were mailed from somewhere in Europe, I think, but the bills that reached us went straight into the bin. Looks like the scam has been updated.
That is true. That being said, fraud is fraud anywhere. You have fraudsters based in Canada (I am Canadian btw), who are scamming American companies and then splitting the money into American and Canadian accounts. What the US Courts have done is found these people to be guilty of fraud (I'm finding it hard to argue against their logic. You have a group charging for a service that they are not providing. No matter how stupid people have to be to fall for that, its still fraud), and they have frozen their US accounts and assets. The Canadian courts can do whatever they want, but if the Canadian court has any conception of justice (or at least just doing their job properly), then they should freeze the Canadian assets and charge the fraudsters too.
There is quite a bit wrong with Americans trying to impose their rulings on everyone. But that doesn't mean they're always wrong. Nor that every case where our two court systems do something like this is a an outrageous act of Americans trampling over our sovereignty.