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Namecheap, or when good registrars turn bad
11/16/14
For a few years, I have been registering my domains with Namecheap, a reseller of eNom.
I came to them from GoDaddy, back when GoDaddy supported the SOPA/PIPA legislation in the US Congress, which would have crippled the Internet. Namecheap was an outspoken opponent of that legislation.
Until a few months ago, I was pretty happy with Namecheap.
But then...
Starting about 2 months back, a significant amount of spam made it through my spam filters. There were a few common threads to that spam, mainly non-sensical headers that the spam filter had a hard time associating with spam.
The other common thread was that pretty much all this spam referenced websites hosted and administered by Namecheap, in particular their namecheaphosting.com domain.
I reported the spam that made it through my filters to Namecheap, through Spamcop. However, nothing happened. The spam kept coming.
I complained on Namecheap's Twitter and Facebook accounts.
And then something actually DID happen: Namecheap blocked me from their Facebook account.
That made clear that Namecheap is now a supporter of spam. They have turned to the dark side.
Time to find another registrar.
Update, 11/17: Posting a link to this blog post on Twitter certainly got somebody's attention at Namecheap.
Lets hope they improve their actions on spam reports. I've reported 15 or so spam mails to them just this morning. And these were only the spam mails that made it through my filters...
Update, 11/18: So far, nothing has changed. Except that Namecheap's Twitter person has gone silent. So, a reaction similar to their Facebook account.
In other words, an acknowledgement that they indeed support spammers, are in bed with spammers, profit from spammers and don't want to lose that unethical income.
Update 12/4: I have now initiated the transfer of my domain registrations to French registrar Gandi.net.
Update 12/10: All my domains are now transferred out of Namecheap. This spam-supporter doesn't get any money from me anymore.
It isn't surprising that Namecheap did not allow expediting some of the transfers out, but just waited out the default time. Bad customer service to the end.
Last Update, 1/2/2015: The spam with the spamvertised domains registered through Namecheap continues, but the spam filters have caught up with it, so it at least doesn't litter my inbox with this filth.
My last remaining tie to this spam-supporting organization is now cut: The SSL wildcard certificate for this domain that I bought through Namecheap expired today, and I got a new one somewhere else.
Good riddance. May Namecheap rot in hell!
Another update, 4/7/2015: It seems that these spammers have now asked Spamcop to no longer send spam reports to them. They obviously got inundated with reports, and want to just spam people without the constant reminder of them being the scum of the earth. Disgusting spammers! They are the lowest lifeform on Earth.
1 comment
I became deluged with ENOM / NameCheap spam beginning on Jun 2016 and I get from 2-4 spam emails from one or the other each day since then and continuing up through today. Unfortunately, my spam filter catches only about 5% from each registrar.
Here is the way my history transitioned. The initial roll out with me as a target started June 2016 and with all of the spam coming from ENOM registered domains. I kept sending abuse@enom daily reports all went ignored. No response whatsoever. So I wrote to the BBB and reported them as being a spam haven partner and after about a week, to my surprise ENOM responded back through the BBB and with that stated they had killed all of the domains I had reported as well as sent me a list of the twelve or so they had deleted. Still this meant little, since the spammer relies on the domain to be productive primarily on the day the spam email is delivered. Well further complaints to ENOM seemed to fall on deaf ears and the spammer moved to using the.co registrar while attempting to depend on the language barrier to stop reports to the .co organization of the bogus WhoIS contact data (I took care care of reporting to them because I am bi-lingual).
Now today the only process that seems to work against ENOM/ NameCheap spam partnership is to report to the registar’s regulating authority the bogus name, address and phone for the domains that are being logged into WhoIS. This still takes up to a week to process, so the spammer and their ENOM / NameCheap spam partner still is virtually unaffected.
Today the spammers have shifted back to NameCHeap almost exclusively and the spammer seems to no longer care that invalid whois data reports are being sumitted to ICANN and the Columbian .co authority, since the evil deed they are doing is completed long before any authority can get to the queue to take down the domain.
NameCheap differs primarily from ENOM in that while ENOM pretends to “take spam seriously” they will do nothing regarding your reports for several days, assuming they do anything at all, and then they make a whoopla about taking action long after it is too late to stop the payload of “first responders” to the spam emails. NameCheap differs in that their abuse@namecheap will blatantly tell you they don’t get involved in customer’s spamming activity and suggest you take it up with some legal authority, saying their hands are tied.
Speaking of legal authority, does anyone know of any lawyer that would take on a class action lawsuit and file it against NameCheap and ENOM? It seems that the loss of more money than their $10 - $40 daily spammer windfall may be the only language that these two can understand.
