The Fraud

Last summer we began receiving a lot of spam as bounced email messages. Spammers had begun fraudulently using our email address as their "From" and/or "Return" address. The amount of bounced email that we received rapidly increased to over several thousand bounced messages per day.

We tracked down the spammers' ISPs to Hong Kong and other parts of China. But all of their domains had been registered in the U.S. by VeriSign's Network Solutions or Tucows. The registration information was apparently bogus and none of the email contact addresses were valid. When we confronted Network Solutions and Tucows with our evidence of this fraud and pointed out that they were aiding and abetting the fraud because their registration information was bogus and invalid, they just blew us off--"not our problem" was essentially their response.

Both registration services were shamelessly lining their pockets with registration fees from these fraudulent spammers while making no or insufficient effort to ensure that the contact information remained valid and failing to respond to complaints of fraud and invalid registration information. Unfortunately, the penalties in Viriginia at that time were not worth the trouble of us pursuing the issue any further.