Tons of spam and calls after domain registration

I'm aware of privacy issues in regards to web domain registration, never been a big issue in the past. The problem is the company I recently used published my BILLING information to WHOIS. WTF?

So it's basically a barrage of spam emails and calls to "help" with my new website. I have updated whois contacts but the calls and emails keep coming to my original billing info. Is there any recourse or way to fix this after the fact?

You can pay extra to make the data private but it's probably too late now :-( ICANN forbids automated solicitations from whois records but of course spammers just do it anyway. Same with robocalls. They're illegal in the US but you can buy telephone exchange access that allow the operator to just make up whatever number as the origin which makes it impossible to track the caller. The chances of being caught and successfully prosecuted for these types of violations are just not high enough to deter people from doing it. I would argue that ICANN should be required to make all records private. There's no justifiable reason for charging people extra for making data private. It's just as much of a scam as the spam.

Icann requires register,  admin,  and tech contact.  I'm fine with that.  The problem is this particular company used my billing info for these, so I never really had a chance to do anything about it.  Other registrars I've used don't operate this way.

Actually I might be a little wr-wr-wrong. It's the registrar and not ICANN that usually offers "domain protection" which is an extra few $. They submit proxy info to ICANN.

Gandi.net did not expose me to spammers.

Their interfaces are sometimes confusing but they do seem to have good intentions.

Yeah was gunna say, you pay the domain registrar extra for the luxury of privacy.

Which company did you use that did this?

john12ax7 said:

I'm aware of privacy issues in regards to web domain registration, never been a big issue in the past. The problem is the company I recently used published my BILLING information to WHOIS. WTF?

So it's basically a barrage of spam emails and calls to "help" with my new website. I have updated whois contacts but the calls and emails keep coming to my original billing info. Is there any recourse or way to fix this after the fact?

Click to expand...

Is the problem with the WHOIS registration (ICAAN), or with your internet provider... ?

The world is full of scammers..(actually not full but there are a lot of them).  Once a year I get people pretending to be official asking me to send "them" money to renew one or the other of my web domains, after a while you can see them coming from a distance.

JR

I started getting regular spam for the first time ever around a month ago .
Filters seemed inefective , I just kept  marking as spam and deleting over and over and over again , now it seems to have stopped for the last day or two . Its nice not having to slop out the spam bucket several times a day , for as long as it lasts .

The company in question is hostgator so I recommend everyone stay away from them,  and probably any EIG owned company.

It 100% has to do with them and not whois, as I've registered domains with other companies and never had this problem.

I plan to cancel and request a refund,  but not optimistic that will undo or stop the damage.