Domain Name News
Domain scam merchants get legs sucked by toothless OFT
30/08/2002
The Office of Fair Trading has given a stern rebuke to the owners of companies that offered false domain names for $59 - and inadvertently given the green light to hundreds more Internet fraudsters.
TLD Network Ltd and Quantum Management (GB), located at 843 Finchley Road in London, have been "stopped from publishing misleading advertisements for website domain names that are difficult to view on the World Wide Web".
Since June 2001, the companies have been selling .sex, .bet, .brit and .scot domains. Of course, these are not ICANN-approved domains and so can only be viewed as sub-domains or on alternative Internet networks. As such, people that forked out for a domain will have been surprised to find it didn't exist and couldn't be used.
Any consumers will also have been frustrated at not having a telephone number to call and a response rate to emails to rival Boo.com. Not that the OFT mentions any of this, nor does it account for the fact that neither company has made any attempt to make these domains available - unlike, for example, New.net, which enables a small browser download to make its domains visible.
Instead, the two brothers acting as sole directors of the two companies - Thomas Goolnik and Edward Goolnik - have promised not to do it again.
Details at: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/26882.html.html
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