eNom is the largest domain name wholesaler and we take this responsibility very seriously. We cooperate with multiple law enforcement agencies, as this is our policy and meets ICANN requirements.  Customers suspected of using eNom products and services for illegal purposes are investigated and appropriate action is taken.

We can confirm that we received the complaint issued by LegitScript and KnujOn, and the complaint is currently under review.

Original Article: KnujOn.com has released a report and corresponding press release claiming that Demand Media’s domain registrar eNom may be knowingly sponsoring fraudulent pharmaceutical networks.

Here are a couple paragraphs from the release:

Our findings are shocking and go a long way to explain the prevalence of cybercrime and spam. While the major focus of the report concerns policy failures, in most cases we connect this with illicit Internet drug traffic. Registrars are the companies that sell domain names and 162 of them may be violating their contracts to the ultimate benefit of widespread criminal networks. 80 Registrars are blocking their WHOIS access. Several Registrars have bad WHOIS for their own websites.

Most troubling, one of the largest Registrars eNom (DemandMedia) may be knowingly facilitating the illicit traffic of rogue pharmaceuticals. eNom has been notified they are sponsoring fraudulent pharmacy networks and are in violation standards set by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy. One network in particular is the GlavMed network, a criminal group that uses spam to advertise illicit sites. eNom pays in excess of half a million dollars per year to ICANN in fees alone and is by far one of the largest Registrars.

The whole report is here (pdf).

We’ve reached out to Demand Media for comment on this and will update when we we receive it.

Demand Media Inc., a start-up company led by Richard Rosenblatt, former CEO of Intermix Media, a controversial spyware company, parent company of MySpace.com, and subsidiary of News Corp., announced the acquisition of domain registrar reseller eNom and niche content developer eHow as part a business plan “ready to bring in both money and traffic.”

Rosenblatt and Demand Media plan to utilize eNom’s 150,000 domain names to create a content network for user-generated content and other content providers. These ad-sponsored parked domains will be transformed into ad-sponsored portals to free content built on a model similar to that of MySpace.com.

Instead of webpages with advertising on them, they’ll now be webpages with advertising on them.

Demand media expects the union to repeat the success of MySpace.com and, “in the long run, parked ad pages as we know them today could be a thing of the past.” The company carries a vault containing $120 million in capital.

Rosenblatt became CEO of Intermix Media in February 2004, just a year before the company was sued by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer for being a source of spyware and adware secretly installed on millions of home computers, in large part due a distribution agreement through file-sharing service Kazaa (the proprietors of which are effectively banned from the U.S. by massive lawsuit threats).

Oh, wait. I was just supposed to say “CEO of the company behind MySpace.”

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