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Spammers Domain Registrar EstDomains Receives ICANN Deactivation Notice

EstDomains, a domain name registrar that worked closely with cyber criminals, suffered another blow after the organization that oversees the net’s address system said it would revoke the company’s right to sell domain names because of a recent fraud conviction of its president in Estonia. EstDomains has been criticized by many security experts for registering domain names used in phishing, spam, malware, and the sale of drugs that are illegal in some countries.

In a letter addressed to EstDomains President Vladimir Tsastsin, an official with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers said EstDomain’s registrar accreditation would be revoked on November 12.

“This termination is based on your status as President of EstDomains and your credit card fraud, money laundering and document forgery conviction,” Stacy Burnette, ICANN’s director of contractual compliance, wrote. ICANN rules permit the group to terminate registrars who have officers or directors convicted of a crime related to financial activities, she said.

Last month, a company that provides software used to shield the identity of domain name owners said it was cutting off EstDomains because a high percentage of its customers used the anonymizing service to register websites that engaged in cyber crime. Three weeks later, network provider Intercage, struggling with its own reputation as a haven for cyber criminals, terminated its contract with EstDomains and its sister company EstHost.

Throughout the entire controversy, principals with EstDomains and EstHost have maintained they do not knowingly allow customers to run illegal websites. “We don’t provide the service for spammers/phishers etc, and we never did,” Konstantin Poltev, registry liaison for EstDomains, wrote in an email to The Register on Wednesday. He said officials with the company were appealing ICANN’s move on several grounds. For one, Tsastsin hasn’t been a director or officer of EstDomains since June. And for another, the February court record, which was reported here by Brian Krebs’s Security Fix blog, has never taken effect.

ICANN is already preparing for the transfer of some 281,000 domain names under EstDomains’ management. The registrar is free to recommend an ICANN-accredited agent to receive a bulk transfer, or qualified registrars may volunteer under established ICANN procedures. It will be interesting to see what companies, if any, agree to take on a customer base with such toxic reputation.

An EstDomains representative said the group was working to block the move.

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