DomainKing.NG : Indian company’s Nigerian customers in limbo for two weeks

DomainKing.NG, allegedly the top domain registrar in Nigeria, has failed to provide basic support to its Nigerian customers, for the past two weeks.

Based in Punjab, India, two of DomainKing.NG’s officers were arrested earlier in February on a variety of charges.

Pune City police arrested the DomainKing.NG founders on fraud charges, but the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) has launched a parallel probe into the case, examining whether charges related to terrorism would apply.

Domains and web sites operated by DomainKing.NG on behalf of its Nigerians customers have been offline, or broken; there have been numerous complaints on Facebook, as it’s the only forum open to the public. The DomainKing.NG support has been offline.

Meanwhile, more details about the case are coming to light, with Indian news web site, Sakal Times reporting the following:

“It has been confirmed that around 116 websites registered by Pakistanis had their IP origin in that country. Most of these websites are related to videos, porn websites and movies. The duo had registered over 86,000 domain names of websites for people from around 100 countries. Many of the websites have words like ISIS, Al-Qaeda and jihad. The accused knew that these are related to terrorists. Even then, they registered these for money. We are in the process of getting records of the accused’s email conversation with those who had got the websites registered and hope to get information about their activities,” a senior officer told Sakal Times.

Officers have also stumbled upon 15 websites with ‘.gov.in’ domain name while seven of them contained the word RBI. These websites have been used by fraudsters to cheat gullible people in the various lottery and jobs scams.

An analysis of the domain names had revealed that they had registered 362 military-related websites and most of them were about the US Army. Besides the registered websites included 452 related to various governments, 249 had the word India, 34 payment gateways, 11 related to ISIS and other terror groups, 81 about jobs, 1492 for banks and 25 porn websites.

The case of DomainKing.NG is of particular interest outside of India and Nigeria, as one of their domain assets, DomainKing.biz, was involved in a UDRP filed by the de facto Domain King®, domain investor Rick Schwartz.

Ironically, several Facebook complaints on the DomainKing.NG Facebook page come from shady characters complaining how their MLM, micro-payment affiliate and questionable charity web sites have been broken or offline; scams are rampant in Nigeria, where the term “419 Scam” originates from.

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