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A Frenchman utilised a chatroom with a Guernsey-registered domain to allegedly recruit dozens of men to rape his wife.
Dominique P has been charged with drugging his wife before allegedly recruiting more than 80 men to rape her.
He allegedly used a chatroom called “a son insu” which provides members a platform to discuss sexual acts between other people and their unconsciouspartners.
While the chatroom sits on a site hosted in Europe, the website used to have a Guernsey-registered domain, and – according to an article in the Telegraph – this meant French authorities found it hard to shut down.
However, Guernsey Police have since said they didn’t receive any contact from French Authorities.
“Guernsey Police can confirm we have not, based on a review of our records, received any contact from the French Authorities about this matter, however after being made aware this morning [26 June] swift action has been taken,” said a Police spokesperson.
“It has been established that the website is hosted in Europe but has a Guernsey-registered domain, the future use of which will be denied.”
After learning of the international news story and its link to a Guernsey registered website, Guernsey Police contacted the registrar – Enrapture Limited – and asked for the .gg route to the website to be closed. Enrapture closed the domain within the hour.
Not only did the authorities in France apparently not contact Guernsey Police, they didn’t contact the registrar of the website in question either, or the registry that holds information on Guernsey registered domains.
“We have strong powers in the registration agreement, which enable us to take action, if the registrar does not. But we are pleased to see that Enrapture as the responsible registrar moved swiftly,” said the CEO of domain registry CHANNELISLES.NET, where details of the site were recorded.
Dr Nigel Roberts said: “This shows that Guernsey is a stable jurisdiction with good internet governance. However, we were somewhat surprised that that the French police could not take the site offline earlier by taking the hosting down through Europol, and that neither Enrapture nor ourselves were contacted earlier.”
Dr Roberts explained that there is no insidious reason why an unsavoury site may want to utilise a Guernsey domain. He said ‘.gg’ is often used by gamer websites because ‘gg’ is common slang for ‘good gamer’. He also said some people simply like the look of ‘.gg’.
Despite this particular incident, Dr Roberts said domain name abuse is actually incredibly low in Guernsey.
“Guernsey has one of the lowest incidents of domain name abuse,” he said, revealing that ‘.je’ is actually the lowest.
Statistics within a recent report from DAAR (Domain Abuse Activity Reporting) undertaken by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), revealed trends from 46,389 .GG sites.
“If size of the .GG zone is taken into account (i.e., the number of domains in zone), in May 2023, on average 0.01% of .GG domains are listed by reputation feeds as phishing domain, 0.00% as malware domains, 0.01% as spam domains, and less than 0.01% listed as botnet command-and-control domains.”
You can see a comparison between .GG sites and Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) below:
While the domain has now been denied, the website could theoretically simply buy a domain elsewhere and keep operating.
The harrowing case is still ongoing, and more than 50 of the 83 men who were involved have now been identified, some of whom have been charged with aggravated rape.
The alleged crimes took place over the course of 10 years and Dominque P has also been charged with raping and murdering a 23-year-old in Paris.
Express has reached out to Enrapture for comment.
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