This site should be careful pointing fingures

[guy]

http://escrow-fraud.com/index.php?page= ... d=7433&d=p caries my name as an owner of a fraudulent site.
That has impacted my economic opportunity. Therefore I do not think very highly of this site. One should not rely on their unverified data.

[lightfair]

Hello,

and thank you for your comment. You're addressing an important problem here - and you're probably not the only one affected.

Let me explain you how the process basically works: If certain members of this forum come across a fake site they will enter this particular site into the database. However, they will NOT enter specific details (like the registrant/owner of the site). Those details are added automatically by quering the public WHOIS database. The WHOIS databases are basically like giant directories containing all the details of the registrants and owners of domain names - in a certain way comparable to phone directories. Those databases are maintained by the registrars - the companies who handle the registration process. So nobody from escrow-fraud actually entered your name - it was automatically added from the relevant PUBLIC database.

So what does that mean? It means that on 2008/09/09 somebody registered the domain in question and used your name for it. That's not something we just claim - that's merely a fact. Before you get any wrong ideas here: I don't think that you had anything to do with this. It was probably some scammer simply using that name - he could have used any other name. Sometimes the scammers use real people's names and full addresses.

So the "target" of your (understandable) anger should probably be firstmost the registrar of the site - in this particular case Yahoo and PrivateReg. You may have noticed that most crucial details (like postal address) are hidden from the data - that's also what the registrar did; he gives criminals the chance to hide behind a semi-anonymity. The "unverified data" part happened the moment the domain was registered - the registrar does NOT care and check if the person registering a site really exists or is impersonating someone else. This big hole in the registration process leads in the end to a situation like this one.

Given the short-lived nature of such sites it is no longer part of the WHOIS database; the domain itself expired in late 2009.

So, where does that leave you and us? I understand that it must feel very bad to have ones name falsely associated with fraud. I'm sure that someone with access to our database will anonymize your name. If you are asked about this incident please point the interested parties to this very thread. Yes, we know that an estimated 90% or more of the fake sites use fake data for registration as well. And sometimes those fake details will point to real people.