Daniel Kleman thought he had a good thing going. He would use a WHOIS directory to find the names and addresses of .ca holders (I happen to be one, holding the rights to davidakin.ca) and then send along what appeared to be an invoice from The Internet Registry of Canada. Kleman was actually soliciting money to have the .ca domain holders changer registrars.
But the IROC invoice was more devious than that. It looked just like an official federal government document, complete with the little half-flag and the use of all the same fonts that Ottawa uses in its official communications.
Well, Industry Canada was not amused, and this week, it fined Kleman and his business $40,000 and put them on a 5-year probation.
Industry Canada's Competition Bureau said, Kleman's pitch, “was designed to mislead recipients into believing that they were existing customers of IROC's domain name registration service. The mail piece also gave the general impression of being an invoice mailed on behalf of a department or agency of the Government of Canada in charge of the registration of Internet domain names.”
I believe he also sent them out to anyone with .com and .net domains registered with Canadian registars. They all look official as though they are renewal notices for your domain. I've thrown out at least 30 of these in the past couple of years.
Everyone is saying it's IROC (Internet Registry of Canada), even the bureau's site says IROC. However, are they not referring to DROC (domain registry of Canada)? I've never heard of IROC, but working with a domain registrar, needless to say we've had our encounters with DROC.