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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."
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.