Fraudulent .Be domains will be taken offline in 24Hrs, DNS Belgium gets more teeth

DNS Belgium, the Belgian domain registrar has announced a partnership with the economy minister to fight fraudulent e-commerce websites. This is expected to lead to a quicker take-down of misleading sites, within 24 hours of their identification, and increase consumer confidence in .be websites.

The new powers allows the withdrawal of .be names at the FPS Economy’s request if they are found to be fraudulent sites. The new protocol is set to be active in 01 December, allowing the registrar to block .be sites used by fraudulent web shops or for phishing. The tool will be used only for sites committing serious crimes, and the domain name holder will be given two weeks to respond to the action. After six months, the domain name registration will no longer be valid.

Previously, FPS Economy couldn’t ask DNS Belgium to block websites based on content, only fraudulent or inaccurate identification data. 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.