Update : AFNIC contacted us regarding our recommandation to complain to them on this case. Since a few weeks, the regulatory context of the registry's operations has changed. Regarding disputes, the 4th paragraph of the annex of this legal text exposes their rights and obligations :

4. Mise en place de procédures de règlement des différends

Therefore AFNIC can't as of today block, suspend or transfer a domain name without a court or arbitration decision. But they confirmed having started even before the newspaper's article the adequate procedure mentioned in this paragraph. This process starts by asking the registrar to verify the authenticity and eligibility of these registrations. Should this process show that the registrations are not in line with the registry's charter and regulations (in particular if the registrar don't reply quickly or precisely enough), AFNIC will take the appropriate actions, such as suspending the incriminated domain names.


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Since a few weeks, a cybersquatter is targeting the French ".fr" ccTLD again. A well-known business newspaper called Les Echos published a few days ago a story about this case.

Until today, AFNIC -the French registry operator- is doing a good job at maintaining a low level of such abuses compared to other TLDs. Strict anti-cybersquatting regulations and decisions have been implemented in the past against a few companies that attempted to register "en masse" .fr domain names. AFNIC played for example a key role in stopping EuroDNS (see here or here), AFX Consulting or KLTE's activities.

Cybersquatters seem nonetheless to want to try again, as a new round of bulk domain names registration is currently occurring (at least 700 domains in the last few days). But this time, the cybersquatter(s) behind this fraudulent behavior aren't easy to spot, as the domain are registered through multiple (fake) identities. We have nonetheless detected the following patterns:

a Bahamas-based company set up by an Italian national who studied in France. The company's board also include a French expert that previously worked for a webhosting provider. A domain reseller might potentially be abusing Internet.bs system.

  • DNS servers : ns1-2.bodis.com

These servers always point to sponsored links Web portals. Such websites don't provide any meaningful content and try to hijack some of the traffic intended to the real websites of the trademark holders. This kind of practice is considered to be registration of domains in "bad faith". Therefore brand owners usually obtain that the infringing domain name be suspended or transfered to them. Bodis.com has been set up by Matt Wegrzyn, a 22-year-old American "domainer", who might be connected with or is aware that cybersquatters use bodis.com web portals to generate profits.

  • Registrant information:

The contact details contains :
- Random fictitious names;
- Postal address + phone number records that simulate existing addresses, potentially picked from business/public administration directories. But almost all of these contact information are not currently allocated;
- E-mail addresses through free webmail providers (@gmx.com, @myemail.com, @hotmail.com, @gmail.com, etc.). Each address is only used for a limited number of registrations (around 30 to 50).
The most interesting e-mail address from this affair is bradklarkson@xxxxx.com, as it has been used since 2009 in previous cybersquatting cases involving .com domain names.

Obviously these domains are not registered in order to set up fraudulent websites. That's why engaging dispute resolution or legal procedures is often considered not worthless. We recommend the organisations affected by this specific scheme to contact and file their complaint with AFNIC directly, as expressed by Loïc Damilaville from AFNIC in the article. Should this step not be successful, AFNIC also introduced a few months ago a new expedited procedure that may help companies targeted by cybersquatting to recover or suspend domain names with limited costs.

If numerous complaints are gathered by AFNIC, the body will question Internic.bs (and by extension its domain name resellers) on this specific case. The registry could after investigations also decide graduated sanctions against the registrar.

NB:
A list of cybersquatted domains can be found on the French newspaper "Les Echos" website, but an error has been noticed following our investigation : "act-info.fr", although registered with the registrar Internet.bs, is not part of the same cybersquatting wave.


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