DNS Belgium, the group that manages Belgium’s .BE country code domain, announced that it will start taking down .BE domains used for fraudulent purposes within 24 hours. According to Domain Name Ware, the new policy goes into effect on December 1, 2018. Domains can be deleted at the request of Belgium’s Federal Public Service Economy (FPS Economy).
Domain names used for phishing and fraudulent websites can be blocked within 24 hours. The registrant will have two weeks in which to respond to such action and the domains will be deleted from the registry after a period of 6 months.
Previously, FPS Economy could not ask DNS Belgium to block domain names based on fraudulent content, since only domain names with fraudulent or inaccurate identification data could be taken down with minimal delay. An application had to be filed with the crown prosecution service in order to block a domain, a process which takes at least two weeks. According to DNS Belgium, “several hundred” fraudulent websites are created every year in the .BE domain.
Interestingly, this approach differs from policies adopted in other European countries. For example, the registry of .DK national domain in Denmark has found that cracking down on false ownership information has eliminated almost all sites used for fake online stores.
Fighting phishing domains is not new to Russian national domains .RU and .РФ. In fact, this is the core activity for a number of companies certified by the Coordination Center for TLD .RU as competent organizations. The need to be able to take down phishing domains without delay is primarily due to the fact that users lured to the websites of this kind can lose substantial sums of money in a matter of minutes. Competent organizations promptly notify the registrars of the domain within which the fraudulent websites operates in order to block it.
