Cold calling using information from domain name WHOIS records

Question

Increasingly I am receiving a lot of cold calls, especially every time after purchasing a domain name, from companies across the globe offering website design or app development services.

The terms of service for any domain name require accurate and up-to-date contact details to be provided for the records held by the registry/registrar.

For the majority of our domain names, it is mandatory for the contact details to be published as part of the WHOIS record, and for some domain names the registries do not allow any kind of WHOIS privacy protection service or masking of details or the providing of fake details.

How are these companies getting notified every time I register a domain name? Are the registries/registrars selling information such as notifications like this to web development companies?

Due to the large number of domains in our portfolio it is cost prohibitive to use a privacy protection service on them all (this would more than double the total cost) and I'm not looking for a solution to prevent these sales calls (at least that's not the question I'm asking here).

I understand the information can be harvested from WHOIS records, however, I would like to know how they find out every time I register a new domain name as thats what prompts a new cycle of sales calls each time.

Answer 1

I have found out these companies obtain the information from websites such as:

• dailychanges.com
• tastereports.com

Answer 2

How are these companies getting notified every time I register a domain name? Are the registries/registrars selling information such as notifications like this to web development companies?

No, there are no notifications needed.

All gTLDs have to provide their zonefile for free, under some contractual obligations not to use it for spamming, etc. See the ICANN CZDS program: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/czds-2014-03-03-en

Zonefiles will contain all resolving domain names (a small % of them will either not have any nameservers or will be put on serverHold and hence won't appear in the zonefiles). They can be accessed once daily.

So easy to find new domains: download the file today, download it again tomorrow, and do the difference, you have the list of all new domains (and all deleted ones too)

You can then do whois queries and get contacts and spam them.

This is the most "efficient" way but not the only one.

Among others:

• some registries directly publish daily list of new created domains. One example: https://www.afnic.fr/en/products-and-services/services/daily-list-of-registered-domain-names/ (done through images but trivial for anyone to parse)
• of course search engines can give you a lot of data, see the site: search modifier for example
• dictionaries provide you with base data to search for (just do a whois query)
• for gTLDs, ICANN also forces registrars to sell all of their data, but that is yearly. Called bulk whois access this would also give a list of domain names. See §3.3.6 of https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/approved-with-specs-2013-09-17-en