Original link: https://oldj.net/article/2023/05/04/the-closure-of-my-name-com-account/
Name.com is an American domain name registrar, mainly engaged in domain name registration, and also provides email post office, website building, hosting and other services. I have registered or hosted many domain names on Name.com, including the domain name of this blog, which was once hosted on Name.com, and then moved to Alibaba Cloud for filing and using domestic hosts.
I once thought that putting my domain name on Name.com is safe, so except for the domain name that needs to be filed, my other domain names are basically placed on Name.com, and everything has been normal for many years. However, let me expect What didn’t happen was that one day my Name.com account was officially closed, and all the domain names in it were also stopped from resolving. Let’s share the whole incident.
shut down
The thing is, in mid-December last year (2022), I suddenly received an email from Name.com, which read as follows:
Hello,
Thank you for your support of Name.com. We recently received notice that the contact details of your account are a partial or exact match to those of an individual sanctioned by the US Government. Please note that your Name.com account remains secure and has not been compromised.
So that we can continue servicing your domain, and to ensure our compliance with US law, we ask that you please promptly verify your identity by providing the following:
- A scan of a government issued personal identification matching the name(s) on your Name.com account (eg registrant, account holder). This can take the form of a driver’s license or passport
We kindly ask that you reply to this email within 48 hours so that we may verify your identity and resolve this matter. Failure to do so may result in termination of services.
We thank you for your understanding and attention to this matter.
Thank you,
Name.com Abuse
Basically, it means that the contact information of my account matches someone who is being sanctioned by the US government, so I have 48 hours to provide my valid documents, otherwise the service may be stopped.
When I received this email, I felt very strange. I double-checked the sender’s address several times, and once suspected that it was some kind of scam or phishing email. However, the sender address does seem to belong to Name.com, so it looks like the email is indeed official.
But I didn’t pay much attention to this email, because I thought it was probably an oolong incident. How can I be sanctioned by the US government? I expect they may or may not send another apology email soon, but my account and service should be unaffected.
Unexpectedly, two days (48 hours) later, I found that two websites I was using could not be accessed, including the home page swh.app of the SwitchHosts project. After some investigation, I found that Name.com stopped the resolution of these domain names. At the same time, I couldn’t log in to Name.com anymore, and when I logged in, it reminded me that my account had been closed.
I just found out that Name.com actually stopped serving me.
connect
At this time, I was still very optimistic, thinking that this was just a temporary accident, as long as I contacted the customer service to communicate, it should be back to normal.
So, according to the contact information on the Name.com official website, I contacted the customer service and explained the situation I encountered. Soon, the customer service replied to me that this situation is out of their control, and I need to contact their other department (Abuse department).
So I wrote another email to that department to explain the situation, and after a few days, they replied with an email with the same content as before, asking me to provide a photo of my ID.
I was not very happy to provide these photos, but there seemed to be no other way, so I replied with a watermarked ID card photo by email.
Unexpectedly, the other party has not heard from him since then.
After waiting for a week or two, I sent an email to inquire about the progress, but there was no response. After that, I sent an email to inquire about it every two weeks or so, but I don’t know if they have already made a qualitative decision on this matter internally, or they have listed me as a hacker. list, all subsequent inquiries went unresponsive.
During this time, I also reflected a little bit, what is the contact information I left on Name.com? It can actually allow the US government to impose sanctions. But after thinking about it for a long time, I can’t remember it, because my Name.com account was registered a long time ago, when I was still renting a house, I think the contact address I left was either the address of a rental house, or It was the address of the company I was working at that time, or it was a fabricated address, but even if it was a fabricated address, I would not write it outrageously. Generally, the last unit number and house number of the address were omitted at most, or they were changed to a different one. numbers that exist. In short, I really can’t imagine that there is anything special about the contact information I left. Could it be that a certain boss rented the same house as me, or that the office I used to work in later moved into a very good unit ?
As time went by, I gradually realized that my chances of getting my account back were getting smaller and smaller. Name.com stopped resolving all the domains in my account and banned me from logging in, so I completely lost control of those domains, I couldn’t modify their information or resolution records, and I couldn’t renew them. Fortunately, apart from swh.app, none of the other domains in my account at Name.com are very important.
Three months passed quickly, and I decided to do the next best thing. I sent them an email saying that if the account cannot be restored, I hope they can provide an authorization code for transferring the domain name so that I can transfer the domain name to another registrar, but as As before, emails still sink into the sea.
appeal
In mid-March of this year (2023), I started thinking about the ICANN channel. After carefully reading the relevant documents on ICANN’s official website, I submitted a complaint to ICANN, explaining the situation I encountered, and hoped that ICANN could intervene in coordination and help me transfer out the domain name.
A few days later, ICANN emailed me back and asked me to submit more detailed information, mainly materials proving that I do own these domain names, previous communication records between me and Name.com, and so on. Among them, the former is mainly the domain name renewal email, the screenshot of the domain name list interface in the backend of the service provider, etc., and the communication record of the latter is more important, that is, the record of your application for transferring the domain name to the service provider and the response (if any) from the other party .
It is a pity that because I often clean up useless old emails, the related domain name registration and renewal notification emails have been deleted, so I cannot provide such email proofs. At the same time, because Name.com has closed my Account, I can’t log in to the background to take screenshots. However, I still found some indirect evidence that can prove that I own several of the main domain names, including the domain name owner information that can be queried on Who.is, etc. Finally, I recorded these evidences and the previous emails with Name.com They were packaged together and sent to ICANN.
It’s basically my last resort, and if ICANN can’t handle it, then I’m really screwed.
result
Then, after a month of waiting, when I was about to contact ICANN again to inquire about the progress, ICANN finally sent a reply:
Thank you for submitting a complaint to ICANN Contractual Compliance. ICANN has reviewed and closed your complaint because:
- The registrar of record demonstrated compliance with Section 5.1 of the Transfer Policy (see https://ift.tt/c2VZzpw ), which takes into consideration the laws and regulations applicable to the registrar. Namely, the registrar advised ICANN the reported domain names were SUSPENDED and Locked for Transfer Pursuant to the Requirements Defined by the us department of the time, Office of Foreign Assets Control. S Shall Abide by Applicable Laws and Governmental Regulations and They May Set their Own Specific Transfer Processses, Prived the Consistent With the relevant ICANN policy.
Please note ICANN cannot dictate registrar to take any specific action for the management of the domain names if that would cause the registrar to violate applicable laws and governmental regulations. You may consider seeking legal advice about your options.
Please note that responses to closed cases are not monitored. Therefore, if you require future assistance or have any questions regarding this case that is being closed, please email [email protected]. If you have a new complaint, please submit it at https ://ift.tt/YvDryZd.
ICANN told me that the registrar informed ICANN that the reported domain name had been placed on hold for resolution and locked for transfer in accordance with requirements set forth by the US Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control. This action complies with ICANN’s regulations, my appeal was not upheld and the case has been closed.
Well, the domain name still can’t be transferred out, but I finally know which department is responsible for this matter. I didn’t expect that a small person like me would have the opportunity to contact the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the US Treasury Department, although I don’t want this at all. connect.
The appeal is closed, which means that this is ICANN’s final decision, and no further explanation or request will be accepted. If I have other questions, I can email them again, or submit a new appeal.
For me, it is obviously extremely difficult or costly to continue to appeal or seek legal assistance to fight a transnational lawsuit, especially when the other party is still behind the banner of sanctions by the US government. I also found the official website of the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. Maybe I can consider contacting this department directly and find something for their staff, but I have been struggling for so long, so I think I should forget it.
The resolution of those domain names has been stopped for several months, and the related services already have alternative domain names, so let’s stop here. If there is a chance, maybe I will have the opportunity to register again after their renewal expires and is released in the future.
a little thought
This incident was a magical experience for me. I have never violated Chinese or American laws, and I have never used those domain names to do illegal or bad things. No matter what country’s standards I can be very confident He considered himself a law-abiding citizen, but was still punished by the US government for “unnecessary” reasons.
My account was closed, maybe it is just the laziness of the staff of Name.com, maybe it has something to do with the background of the era of Sino-US confrontation, the specific reason I probably will never know. The only luck is that the few domain names I lost are basically unimportant except swh.app. My work-related domain names and the domain name of this blog are all in Alibaba Cloud and have not been affected. Just imagine, if the domain name of an important service is shut down so roughly, how much damage might it suffer?
Before, I thought it was very troublesome to register and use domain names in China, but now I think that no matter how troublesome these things are, it is better than the situation where the account is closed inexplicably and the domain name cannot be retrieved. In the worst case, we can at least find someone for the domestic registrar, at least we can go to court, but if it is a foreign registrar like Name.com playing hooligans, it will be troublesome to deal with.
Perhaps most of the American companies have a good reputation, behind which is the accumulation of decades and hundreds of years, but now the US government is destroying this reputation. In a big way, the United States and its allies freeze the assets of Russians. In a small way, there are things like My domain name account was closed. For foreigners, the risks of locating assets in the United States or relying on American service providers are increasing.
This matter is over. Right now, I’m seriously considering moving some important services back home, or at least having a domestic back-up – who knows if this will happen in the future?
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