We received two responses overnight to our story yesterday in which we told you that AdamsNames.com which operates the ccTLD’s .TC, .GD & .VC had been hacked and its back end provider Key-Systems “locked the registry down” to proect it.
However in the responses that we received from Adamsnames.com today one of which is in the form of an open letter to the Internet Community; they tell quite a different story:
The first comment we received was this:
Our domain name of our website Adamsnames.com hijacked by Key-Systems GmbH.
AdamsNames website is in Turkey since August 2012 and have not changed.
In the open letter to the Internet Community AdamsNames Writes
We are very sorry to have to write to you in such a situation. We are currently experiencing a high level Corporate hijack from the minority shareholder Carsten Pauli and Key Systems GmbH.
As you are all aware AdamsNames Ltd has been run by us for a while.
Key Systems is our former Registry Backend provider.
We recently noticed, the adamsnames.com domain, for which Key Systems was the Registrar had been illegally transferred into another account without any notice or authorization from us.
Upon realizing this we transferred our other gTLD domains to another Registrar.
Due to this matter we lost trust in Key Systems GmbH and decided to run it ourselves.
Please be aware that our Registry is fully operational. All domains can be registered, renewed and updated as usual. We could not trust a company with three ccTLD’s if we could not trust them with one domain!
AdamsNames Ltd can be reached through the following sites. Please do not trust any other sites:
www.adamsnames.co.uk
www.adamsnames.net
www.adamsnames.eu
www.adamsnames.org
We would also like to point out that our IP addresses remain the same as from August 2012 and have not changed.
If you have any questions please E-Mail website@adamsnames.co.uk
We thank you for your patience and understanding, we hope for a speedy resolution to the situation.””
For the record this was the statement we received from Key Systems Yesterday:
“”Yesterday, the KSregistry GmbH, a fully owned subsidiary of the Key-Systems GmbH, learned that a third party has executed a transfer of the domain name adamsnames.netand now operates a shadow registry under this domain. According to the CEO of AdamsNames Ltd., Mr. Carsten Pauli, this transfer was not authorized by the registry operator.
The provision of the technical back-end services by KSregistry GmbH for the ccTLDs .TC, .GD and .VG authorized by AdamsNames Ltd., is currently being negatively affected by the actions of the third party.
In order to not endanger the integrity of the zone after addressing the issues, the Key-Systems GmbH as registrar decided that modifications to domains under .TC, .GD and .VG are temporarily not allowed. The resolution and renewal of the domains will not be affected.””
Key-Systems is the owner and operator of Moniker.com and SnapNames.com
Key-Systems GmbH has at no time hijacked a domain name from Adamsnames Ltd. It has in the incident referred to by the party currently claiming to represent Adamsnames acted upon a request of the director of Adamsnames Ltd. who is also the signatory of the agreement outsourcing the technical backend of the registry to KSregistry GmbH.
On the other hand the transfer of the domain name adamsnames.net and with that the ability to change the management of the zone has to our knowledge been initiated without permission of Adamsnames Ltd.
It is noteworthy that at this time the domain names listed by the current technical operator list Adamsnames Ltd. as registrant:
ADAMSNAMES.NET
adamsnames.org
adamsnames.eu
You may draw your own conclusions.
This actually raises a .BIG .QUESTION? Don’t you think? Smaller registries are more likely to get into this .MESS.
Its .VC or .VG?
Adamsnames Ltd., the operator of the affected ccTLDs has just released the following statement:
http://adamsnames.com/?page_id=187
Priority message to all our customers and registrars
Dear Madam / Sir,
since 8th March 2013, many of our clients were contacted by some people who pretended to be AdamsNames Limited. They received the announcement of an alleged migration of our .gd, .tc and .vg TLD registry to another system, with the adamsnames.net website as a basis. We are seriously concerned about the confusion that was caused by this illegal action.
Please be aware of the following facts:
1. The people running the false “AdamsNames Limited” are Ertan Ulutas and his assistants Ayse Ergen and Tolga Kaprol, acting simultaneously as “TCNET Ltd.”. They are seated in Istanbul and not in London. For some time, Ertan Ulutas worked as one of our system administrators. TCNET had acted as a registrar for us in Turkey, had sold quite a lot of domains, but had failed to pay our invoices, so that we terminated the business relationship without notice.
2. Since 23rd April 2012, Director of AdamsNames Limited is Carsten Pauli. Ertan Ulutas has never been Director or shareholder of our company. He is not authorised to act on behalf of AdamsNames Limited. These facts are filed at Companies House in Cardiff.
3. On 18th March 2013, the domains http://www.adamsnames.net and http://www.adamsnames.org were reassigned to us. The nameservers were changed so that the false AdamsNames website on adamsnames.net is offline now.
The domain history shows that the domains http://www.adamsnames.net and http://www.adamsnames.org had originally been registered for AdamsNames Limited, until Ertan Ulutas abused his position of trust and changed the ownership to himself resp. his TCNET. This happened without authorisation by our Director Carsten Pauli. We call this a criminal act.
4. All that we want is to continue our business and run the registries for the .gd, .tc and .vg TLD like before the 08th March 2013. Maybe we will be forced to take some other legal action against Ertan Ulutas and his assistants, but this will not infringe our daily work.
Please pay attention to some important aspects:
a) Since 10th March 2013, we have provided new access data for all registrars. If you are in doubt whether you use the correct data, please do not hesitate to contact us for the appropriate information.
b) In case that you have registered, deleted or transferred .gd, .tc and/or .vg domains since 8th March 2013, please send us a complete list with all the appropriate registration data for validation purposes as soon as possible. We will crosscheck our data immediately and transmit our confirmation within one week. If you should have submitted registrations to the false AdamsNames website on http://www.adamsnames.net, we will adopt those registrations whenever possible. Of course, we will not claim additional charges.
c) All payments that were made into our bank account No. 14211500 at Adam & Company are safe and have been credited to the appropriate clients’ account in our books. For each registrar, the details will be shown in our next monthly invoice on 31st March 2013.
However, if you should have payed into another account on the basis of an invoice or other information that you have received from the false AdamsNames website since 8th March 2013, please provide us with full information about this process (e.g. invoice, receipt for payment) as soon as possible.
For further queries on the issues mentioned above, please do not hesitate to contact our Legal Department (legal@adamsnames.com).
We apoIogise for any inconvenience.
Kind regards
AdamsNames Limited
Carsten Pauli, Director