ICANN is to terminate a Russian registrar's accreditation. NameForName, Inc. is a company owned by an alleged cybergang member, Andrey Taame, who is currently at large. It is worth noting that NameForName, Inc was not accredited by the Coordination Center for TLD RU/РФ: the registrar has obtained ICANN accreditation on his own.
ICANN has sent a notice to NameForName, Inc., informing the registrar of terminating its license as the registrar failed to perform its duties and breached the terms of registrar agreement. There were only 5 second-level domains managed by the registrar.
Meanwhile, Andrey Taame, the contact person of the registrar, is at large, with FBI issuing a search warrant in his name due to a massive Internet Fraud connected to the DNS Changer malware. Six Estonian nationals and one Russian national, Andrei Taame, generated over $14 million in illegitimate income by entering into agreements with advertising brokers and increasing the traffic fraudulently. A number of fake companies was created to deal with advertising brokers, and the illegitimate traffic was rerouted using DNS Changer malware, which was distributed as an alleged video codec. FBI estimates the number of hijacked computers at 4 million in 100 countries.
In November 2011, six Estonian nationals were arrested and taken into custody in Estonia by the Estonian Police and Border Guard Board, while Andrei Taame still remains at large to this day.
Earlier, one of the gang members owned a registrar company named EstDomains. The Delaware-registered Estonian company managed over 280,000 second-level domain names and was notoriously popular in the cybercrime world. As for EstDomains, ICANN had revoked the registrar's license in 2008 due to the company's CEO having a criminal record.
ICANN revokes about 20 registrar licenses per year, with total number of ICANN-accredited registrars estimated at hundreds.
At the moment, Andrei Taame is at large, while FBI, Estonian Police and The Netherlands Police have issued search warrants for the cybercriminal.
