(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In an effort to clear its name following the US Federal Trade Commission’s (www.ftc.gov) takedown of its web hosting brand 3FN.NET, which has been accused of hosting spam, Pricewert has issued an official announcement in which it claims to have never intentionally provided illegal businesses any services, and that there is no evidence to prove otherwise.
According to Pricewert, 3FN has provided web hosting services over the past six years, quickly notifying and assisting authorities about spam, phishing schemes, botnets, child pornography, and other harmful electronic content, which the FTC’s claimed it knowingly hosts, and actively participates in soliciting.
Pricewert said the court’s decision to cut off its servers from the Internet and freezing its assets severely limits its operations and makes it hard to defend itself and provide evidence of its innocence.
Pricewert compares its record of hosting illegal activity to that of respectful email providers such as hotmail and yahoo providing a platform for spam without being accused of facilitating spam or being threatened with closure from the FTC. “There may be a number of doubtful customers or users in every company,” reads the statement.
Pricewert goes on to write that all its upstream service providers are able to prove that its Support and Abuse Department always reacts to illegal content found, and never ignores any abuses or complaints.
“We have had a positive experience in cooperating with FBI regarding issues connected to one of our customers and we have solved the issue in a quite short period of time,” Pricewert states. “It can be easily proved that our company is always open to cooperate with authorities and there is no difficulty in contacting us.”
Pricewert noted that its ICQ instant messaging logs, which show “dialogue between our representative and botnet owner,” were misinterpreted, and were actually intended to obtain further information about the botnet holders, which would be reported to the authorities, which they could use to shut down their servers.
Furthermore, Pricewert said that claims that 3FN was sent more than 70 abuse reports to since 2005 made by Spamhaus, which assisted in the 3FN shut down case, were taken out of context. Spamhaus currently reports no outstanding abuses or complaints about 3FN. Also, 70 abuses in 4 years seems small considering that Spamhaus reports more than 100 daily abuses.
The company also notes that had the FBI or FTC contacted Pricewert before the shut down, it would have agreed to cooperate and would have provided information that could have been used to investigate and find scammers. Instead, Pricewert noted, “Authorities responsible for the shut down just warned criminals and let them to escape and now each hosting provider risks to get new dishonourable customers that will just hide and protect their data much more thoroughly.”
Pricewert hopes to appeal the case and claim millions of dollars in the damages.
