[FreeDNS] Registration backlogs and rejected applications

[Christiaan Keet <hostmaster@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Recently we have seen a huge increase in forged contact details to
go with domain name registrations. Most of these unfortunately
involve the use of names of people with previously registered za.net
or za.org domain names with made up or nonexistent addresses and
fairly "generic" email contact details. 

These fake registrations are almost always used as basis for spam
email or (other) illegal online activities.

This has been a growing concern for us because of the risk of
implication to our legitimate users in abuse issues or illegal
activities. 

This morning we rejected a few thousand applications from gmail.com
addresses that were in the registration queue when we identified a
really high concentration of these fake applications using gmail.com
addresses. To give you an idea, we normally don't get more than a
few tens of applications from gmail.com at a time. Unfortunately
there was no way for us to sensibly sift the real applications from
the fake ones and this was a fairly harsh decision to make. We are
aware that quite a few legitimate registrations would have been
rejected for this reason. I wanted to apologise to you if you were
one of the people who had your application rejected through this.

I have no doubt that most of you would have noticed that our response
times have also gone downhill of late - again mostly due to the
huge influx of these fake registrations and having to deal with the
fallout thereof.

As you are aware, we've always run this as a free service - but
unfortunately it has now come to the stage where we simply cannot
manage the overhead of this kind of abusive behaviour in our spare
time anymore. We are currently evaluating what can be done to salvage
the situation, if anything, and hope to have more news soon.

- Christiaan

-- 
  ZA NiC Hostmaster             http://www.za.net/
  hostmaster@xxxxxxxxxx   Tel/Fax: +44 1442 240870
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