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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.
The US Court sure the hell has jurisdiction in the US, where the crimes took place.
The thing about the "stupidity tax" as so many call it is not that it harms the stupid, it is that it rewards the corrupt.
You can laugh at the people who fall for things like this and pat yourself on the back all you like, but it is wrong. It isn't helping society. It isn't weeding out the weak and stupid. It is rewarding evil.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.
Going on means going far
Going far means returning