The Apparent Deal with Factcheck.com

Surprisingly, nobody appears to have gotten to the root of the mystery of factcheck.com. Marshall over at TalkingPointsMemo say the Soros people disclaim involvement. That makes sense. The only way to re-route the site so quickly would be for the domain controller to use a re-direct. DNS servers take several days on average to update.

So who owns the site? According to Internic, the domain was registered to one of those "placeholder" corporations - specifically, a company named "Domain Name Sales Corp."

Here's the details:

Domain Name: FACTCHECK.COM
Registrar: DOMAIN NAME SALES CORP.
Whois Server: whois.domainnamesales.com
Referral URL: http://www.domainnamesales.com
Name Server: NS1.15X.NET
Name Server: NS2.15X.NET
Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Updated Date: 12-sep-2004
Creation Date: 04-feb-2004
Expiration Date: 04-feb-2007

This Google search brings up a bogus cache for factcheck but the leader of what the site used to say claims: . factcheck.com is undergoing further development. For development information, search the whois record at www.netsol.com. So it would appear that in February of this year, the "leading education site on the internet" (as factcheck.com one described itself) lost control of its domain name - possibly through insolvency, but perhaps through getting it "poached" by Domain Name Sales Corp (though they are a licensed domain retailer according to internic.

My guess is that some enterprising employee of this company, based in the U.S. Virgin Islands is behind the redirect. The fact that it STILL redirects to GeorgeSoros.com suggests that the company is aware of it...

UPDATE
A WHOIS search from tucow.com, the WHOIS provider recommended by Domain Name Sales Corp. is similarly unhelpful, pointing back again to Domain Name Sales Corp. It is possible that this company actually provides concealment of domain owners - taking the official contact information and acting as an intermediary to the actual domain holder. I see no evidence of it, but it's registration in various notoriously low-regulation environments suggests the possibility that it's a retail ownership-concealment service...

Registrant:
Name Administration Inc. (BVI)
Box 10518 A.P.O.
Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands B.W.I.
KY

Domain name: FACTCHECK.COM

Administrative Contact:
Domain, Administrator admin@nameadmininc.com
Box 10518 A.P.O.
Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands B.W.I.
KY
+1.345.946.6879
Technical Contact:
Domain, Administrator admin@nameadmininc.com
Box 10518 A.P.O.
Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands B.W.I.
KY
+1.345.946.6879


Registrar of Record: DomainNameSales
Record last updated on 12-Sep-2004.
Record expires on 04-Feb-2007.
Record created on 04-Feb-2004.

Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.15X.NET 66.199.187.170
NS2.15X.NET 66.199.187.171


Domain status:
REGISTRAR-LOCK


This information was obtained from a different whois server, so we cannot verify its authenticity.