Report Invalid Whois Contact Information to ICANN?

I really hate this whole business of domain name marketing. You get scummy&#x2F;scammy&#x2F;slimy tactics like this when people are motivated to game the system for profit.<p>You know what? I have no obligation to keep an open line of communication to anyone. I mainly have a domain so I don&#x27;t have to memorize the IP address of my servers that mainly I use, and so I never have to change my email address. My registrar can get ahold of me for billing and technical purposes, but otherwise I don&#x27;t want to see spam about domain name SEO BS. I may keep the requisite RFC recommended email aliases open for technical contact purposes, but I have no responsibility to respond to emails sent to those addresses, and I fully reserve the right to drop all traffic from IPs that send spam to those email addresses.

It <i>is</i> a slimy tactic to report someone&#x27;s email address just because you can&#x27;t get hold of them. No wonder this is written by a domain peddler.

Yeah I&#x27;ve often wondered if this would be an effective way of stealing domains.<p>On a side note, does anyone know if Kirsty and Robert still work at ycombinator? No reason.<p>edit: Ooh, it looks like YC&#x27;s address info is incorrect on one of their whois entries. Are they at 32 or 320 Pioneer Way? And those phone numbers are completely wrong too.

On a lark in 2005, I reported Unilever to ICANN after being unable to reach a person regarding a domain they owned but had gone unused since its creation (according to Wayback). I helped our team file an official domain ownership dispute then promptly forgot about it since it was in our lawyer&#x27;s hands.<p>Six months later I noticed that ownership had changed and much to the chagrin of our domain manager and legal representative who was supposed to handle the whole thing; the domain was in the hands of another company who had legal trademark right in another industry.<p>Not sure if corollary is causal here, but it &#x27;FELT&#x27; like ICANN worked for a brief second, there.

Grabbing a domain via this method does feel slimy. The main reason there are so many inaccurate WHOIS records are because spammers scan the records and inundate you with spam&#x2F;phishing.<p>My registrar &quot;accidentally&quot; put my real mobile number from my billing info (instead of my Skype number) in my WHOIS record once and I had to get another number it was so bad.

Am I required to respond to people who contact me if I want to keep my domains?<p>I&#x27;ve been approached by someone who wanted a domain I have, but I usually just don&#x27;t respond, lest my words be seen as &quot;bad faith&quot;.

Domain names have have three contact points, address, phone and email. If only one is wrong I doubt the domain will be deleted. If all the contact info is wrong then sure, dispute it and let it go back into the pool.<p>I&#x27;ve reported domains that had obviously fake contact info on them, like fake phone numbers or fake addresses. If you don&#x27;t want to use real info use a proxy service.

&quot;suggesting that the domain name can be reported to ICANN, and if they can’t get in touch with the owner, it might be delete (sic) and he could possibly catch the drop.&quot;<p>Well first to clear something up ICANN merely forwards these complaints to registrars to investigate.<p>ICANN does not do anything to delete the domain name or anything like that.<p>Nor do they have any way to do that (other than getting the registrar of the name to delete it which they aren&#x27;t going to do). There is no button they can press. In theory the registry above the registrar (Verisign for .com .net, PIR for .org, Afilias for .info) could but they won&#x27;t either.<p>A registrar will simply attempt to contact the owner and depending on how that goes will decide how to proceed with something like this. For practical and legal reasons registrars are not going to delete a domain name and invite a host of problems just because of an incorrect email address and because a form was submitted to ICANN. (There are other things they might do but that&#x27;s not the practical solution to the problem).<p>The above is based on my involvement with a registrar for many many years (longer than most registrars have been around) on what you could call a &quot;senior&quot; level.

tl;dr:<p>&quot;Someone pointed out to me that I could game the system to get my hands on a domain I may make money reselling. I have mixed feelings because I&#x27;m a good person but still I like money. In the end I don&#x27;t think I will do it. Where is my cookie?&quot;

I get that it&#x27;s useful to have the occasional reminder of the importance of paperwork, but does it really need to come in the form of such a horrid looking site?

If a domain registrar really needed force a response from a registrant they would probably just shut off the domain (disable it) rather than deleting it.<p>IMHO

ICANN are extremely vigilant in this area. I once reported a website when I couldn&#x27;t get in contact with the owner and within 2 days it was taken down

oooh so dirty, i like it