Casascius phishers demanding a ransom

[memvola]

Chrome knows it's a phishing site and conveniently redirects to https://www.casascius.com/

I like the idea of changing the name, regardless of the ransom.

Also, basically, Casascius doesn't have to sell coins through its own website, and maybe shouldn't even do it (e.g. http://www.memorydealers.com/one-physical-bitcoin.html)

[saadtariq30]

I'll be honest i just got interested in the physical bitcoins AFTER reading about this scam site(yeah i knew about them earlier but i was all meeh)..and now i actually want a few...btw casascius you got pm

[deepceleron]

I have contacted the internet.bs registrar (where the .net is registered), who said they will forward this information to their abuse department. It is possible that they will pull the domain ownership themselves instead of needing to get an ICANN dispute done, as the use of the domain has materially violated their own terms and agreements:

a. Revocation by us. We reserve the right to immediately suspend, cancel, transfer, modify, or terminate your Registration for any reason, including, without limitation, (i) your material breach of this Agreement; (ii) your use of any services, including, without limitation, the Domain registered to you, that is in contradiction of applicable laws or customarily acceptable usage policies of the Internet, including, without limitation, sending unsolicited commercial advertisements (including, without limitation, spamming) or sending threats, harassments, and obscenities; (iii) your use of your Domain in connection with unlawful or unethical activity; (iv) our receipt of an order from a court of competent jurisdiction or an arbitration award; or (iv) any other grounds for suspension, cancellation, transfer, modification, or termination that is determined by our sole discretion. You understand and agree that you will not receive any refund whatsoever for any such suspension, cancellation, transfer, modification, or termination of your Registration for any reason.

[sadpandatech]

I have contacted the internet.bs registrar (where the .net is registered), who said they will forward this information to their abuse department. It is possible that they will pull the domain ownership themselves instead of needing to get an ICANN dispute done, as the use of the domain has materially violated their own terms and agreements:

a. Revocation by us. We reserve the right to immediately suspend, cancel, transfer, modify, or terminate your Registration for any reason, including, without limitation, (i) your material breach of this Agreement; (ii) your use of any services, including, without limitation, the Domain registered to you, that is in contradiction of applicable laws or customarily acceptable usage policies of the Internet, including, without limitation, sending unsolicited commercial advertisements (including, without limitation, spamming) or sending threats, harassments, and obscenities; (iii) your use of your Domain in connection with unlawful or unethical activity; (iv) our receipt of an order from a court of competent jurisdiction or an arbitration award; or (iv) any other grounds for suspension, cancellation, transfer, modification, or termination that is determined by our sole discretion. You understand and agree that you will not receive any refund whatsoever for any such suspension, cancellation, transfer, modification, or termination of your Registration for any reason.

  Well how bout dem biscuits.  It will be nice to see if they follow through accordingly then.

[Raoul Duke]

I have contacted the internet.bs registrar (where the .net is registered), who said they will forward this information to their abuse department. It is possible that they will pull the domain ownership themselves instead of needing to get an ICANN dispute done, as the use of the domain has materially violated their own terms and agreements:

a. Revocation by us. We reserve the right to immediately suspend, cancel, transfer, modify, or terminate your Registration for any reason, including, without limitation, (i) your material breach of this Agreement; (ii) your use of any services, including, without limitation, the Domain registered to you, that is in contradiction of applicable laws or customarily acceptable usage policies of the Internet, including, without limitation, sending unsolicited commercial advertisements (including, without limitation, spamming) or sending threats, harassments, and obscenities; (iii) your use of your Domain in connection with unlawful or unethical activity; (iv) our receipt of an order from a court of competent jurisdiction or an arbitration award; or (iv) any other grounds for suspension, cancellation, transfer, modification, or termination that is determined by our sole discretion. You understand and agree that you will not receive any refund whatsoever for any such suspension, cancellation, transfer, modification, or termination of your Registration for any reason.

  Well how bout dem biscuits.  It will be nice to see if they follow through accordingly then.

They didn't care much when that NY lawyer sent them a C&D because of my domain calling him a scammer, but this case is on a different level, so maybe they'll act on it.

Digging on my mail found their response to him, in a message they sent as BCC to me

Dear Michael,

you should contact the Registrant, we are merely the Registrar. As a courtesy
we have forwarded your message to the account holder.

Regards,

Hope they take the domain down for you, Mike.

[TTBit]

How do we know the guy who wrote the note is the guy who owns the site?

[sadpandatech]

How do we know the guy who wrote the note is the guy who owns the site?

  Unless the goal is to actually track down 'the guy' then it really doesn't matter, does it?

  My troll senses are tingling though and wonder if you are trying to suggest 'the guy' or the site, one or the other, or both could be 'shills' of the real Casascius?

  Its probably just the coffee...... 

[mizerydearia]

Thank you for your inquiry concerning the content of a website. Although we appreciate your concern, ICANN does not have contractual authority to address complaints about website content.

ICANN is not a government agency. ICANN is a private sector, not-for-profit organization with limited technical responsibility for coordinating the unique assignment of Internet domain names and IP addresses.
Therefore, ICANN cannot address consumer complaints regarding the following
matters:

1. Spam complaints
2. Website content complaints
3. Failure to answer phones promptly
4. Failure to respond to e-mail messages promptly
5. Overbilling/Multiple billing
6. Computer viruses

These types of consumer complaints are not addressed in the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) and are therefore not a violation of the RAA.
Please see, http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/ra-agreement-21may09-en.htm.

If you believe the website content refers to anything illegal, your best course of action is to contact a law enforcement agency in your jurisdiction or to seek legal advice from an attorney.

If you are concerned about the content of an email message or a web page, you should contact the domain name holder or the applicable Internet Service Provider.

Best regards,

ICANN Services

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN

ICANN is responsible for managing the Internet Protocol address spaces (IPv4 and IPv6) and assignment of address blocks to regional Internet registries, for maintaining registries of Internet protocol identifiers, and for the management of the top-level domain name space (DNS root zone), which includes the operation of root nameservers.

Oh really?  ICANN says otherwise.

[mizerydearia]

a. Revocation by us. We reserve the right to immediately suspend, cancel, transfer, modify, or terminate your Registration for any reason, including, without limitation, (i) your material breach of this Agreement; (ii) your use of any services, including, without limitation, the Domain registered to you, that is in contradiction of applicable laws or customarily acceptable usage policies of the Internet, including, without limitation, sending unsolicited commercial advertisements (including, without limitation, spamming) or sending threats, harassments, and obscenities; (iii) your use of your Domain in connection with unlawful or unethical activity; (iv) our receipt of an order from a court of competent jurisdiction or an arbitration award; or (iv) any other grounds for suspension, cancellation, transfer, modification, or termination that is determined by our sole discretion. You understand and agree that you will not receive any refund whatsoever for any such suspension, cancellation, transfer, modification, or termination of your Registration for any reason.

link to this please

[sadpandatech]

Thank you for your inquiry concerning the content of a website. Although we appreciate your concern, ICANN does not have contractual authority to address complaints about website content.

ICANN is not a government agency. ICANN is a private sector, not-for-profit organization with limited technical responsibility for coordinating the unique assignment of Internet domain names and IP addresses.
Therefore, ICANN cannot address consumer complaints regarding the following
matters:

1. Spam complaints
2. Website content complaints
3. Failure to answer phones promptly
4. Failure to respond to e-mail messages promptly
5. Overbilling/Multiple billing
6. Computer viruses

These types of consumer complaints are not addressed in the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) and are therefore not a violation of the RAA.
Please see, http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/ra-agreement-21may09-en.htm.

If you believe the website content refers to anything illegal, your best course of action is to contact a law enforcement agency in your jurisdiction or to seek legal advice from an attorney.

If you are concerned about the content of an email message or a web page, you should contact the domain name holder or the applicable Internet Service Provider.

Best regards,

ICANN Services

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN

ICANN is responsible for managing the Internet Protocol address spaces (IPv4 and IPv6) and assignment of address blocks to regional Internet registries, for maintaining registries of Internet protocol identifiers, and for the management of the top-level domain name space (DNS root zone), which includes the operation of root nameservers.

Oh really?  ICANN says otherwise.

  Thats Wiki...
They enforce the RAA. Not sure what the complaint was you sent them, but it must have been too soft.  Read the RAA.

[TTBit]

How do we know the guy who wrote the note is the guy who owns the site?

  Unless the goal is to actually track down 'the guy' then it really doesn't matter, does it?

  My troll senses are tingling though and wonder if you are trying to suggest 'the guy' or the site, one or the other, or both could be 'shills' of the real Casascius?

  Its probably just the coffee...... 

not at all. I'm a Casascius fan. Just pointing out that anyone could have sent that e-mail.

[sadpandatech]

How do we know the guy who wrote the note is the guy who owns the site?

  Unless the goal is to actually track down 'the guy' then it really doesn't matter, does it?

  My troll senses are tingling though and wonder if you are trying to suggest 'the guy' or the site, one or the other, or both could be 'shills' of the real Casascius?

  Its probably just the coffee...... 

not at all. I'm a Casascius fan. Just pointing out that anyone could have sent that e-mail.

  No worries, m8. Good to know my assumptions were wrong. Yea, that was one of the caveats pointed out to giving in to extortion, in that one would have no way to verify if the extortioner is who they claim to be.

[casascius]

The sender did put his bitcoin address in the DNS record of the casascius.net domain as evidence that he controlled the domain.

[Explodicle]

It's not THAT clever... Some day the market cap will be so high, and laundering so effortless, that scum like this will even use Bitcoin when kidnapping human beings. I'm sure I'm not the first one to realize this.

I realize Bitcoin has the potential to bring much more good to the world, but early on this was hard for me to accept.

[cbeast]

It's not THAT clever... Some day the market cap will be so high, and laundering so effortless, that scum like this will even use Bitcoin when kidnapping human beings. I'm sure I'm not the first one to realize this.

I realize Bitcoin has the potential to bring much more good to the world, but early on this was hard for me to accept.

The anonymity aspect of bitcoin isn't so important. The best part of bitcoin is the fact that we can outsource the bankers and replace them with machines in foreign countries.

[PatrickHarnett]

Although largely pointless, you could message webmail.co.za and inform them of the user account in breach of their terms of service - engaging in extortion would probably count in most jurisdictions as illegal.

[Rassah]

I speak Russian. I think the OP could've summarized his reply to the scammer in just three words

Ёб твoю мaть

and left it at that, instead of writing up such a big email. Doubt the Russian could understand half of it anyway.

[sethsethseth]

You have definitely profited from this.  Just ordered up a 25btc I wouldn't have known about without this thread.  Change the name though, because I have no idea how to pronounce this.

[eldentyrell]

Change the name though, because I have no idea how to pronounce this.

+1

[julz]

Change the name though, because I have no idea how to pronounce this.

+1

+1

I thought I knew how to pronounce this - until I saw the video with Plato and Casascius at the gas station, where Plato pronounced it:
kasaysh-ee-us   - ie the first a is as in 'cat' and the second a is as in 'baby'

As casascius didn't comment when Plato pronounced it that way.. I guess that's the correct way

I would have pronounced it 'kasask-ee-us'   - where both 'a's are pronounced as in 'cat'.