Facebook says Namecheap was not cooperating and sharing details about the suspected domain owners.
This week Facebook filed a lawsuit against Namecheap, one of internet’s largest domain name registrars.
The social networking giant says that Namecheap has refused to cooperate in an investigation into a series of fraudulent domains registered through its service that impersonated the brand on Facebook.
Christen Dubois, Facebook Director and Associate General Counsel, said today that Facebook engineers monitored 45 suspicious lookalike Facebook domains registered through Namecheap, which had information of the owners concealed through the company’s WhoisGuard side-service.
Some of the sample domains have included instagrambusinesshelp.com, facebo0k-login.com and whatsappdownload. Site likes.
Dubois said these lookalike domains — which exploit the Facebook brand — are widely used for phishing, fraud, and scam.
“We sent notices to Whoisguard between October 2018 and February 2020, and despite their obligation to provide information about these infringing domain names, they declined to cooperate,” Dubois said.
“We don’t want people to be deceived by these web addresses, so we’ve taken legal action,” the Facebook exec said.
According to ZDNet, namecheap respond to them saying that
“Namecheap takes every fraud and abuse allegation extremely seriously, and diligently investigates each reported case of abuse. We want to be clear, we actively remove any evidence-based abuse of our services on a daily basis. Where there is no clear evidence of abuse, or it is purely a trademark claim, Namecheap will direct complainants, such as Facebook, to follow industry standard protocol. Outside of said protocol, a legal court order is always required to provide private user information. Facebook may be willing to tread all over their customers’ privacy on their own platform, and in this case it appears they want other companies to do it for them, with their own customers. This is just another attack on privacy and due process in order to strong arm companies that have services like WhoisGuard, intended to protect millions of Internet users’ privacy.”
