Personal dispute jeopardizes all .gd, .tc and .vg domain names

Grenada (.gd),  Turks en Caicos Islands (.tc) and British virgin islands (.vg) with a combined population of only about 170.000 people, have all trusted the management of their top level domain into the hands of the English company AdamsNames Ltd. A personal dispute at the top of AdamsNames Ltd is now putting all domain names under .gd, .tc and .vg at risk.

In mid-2012 AdamsNames had entrusted technical management of the TLD’s to KSRegistry. This is a reasonably new registry provider who focuses on running some of the new gTLD’s that will be coming out later this year. The existing TLD’s from AdamsNames were a good way for KSRegistry to showcase their system to future clients.

On March 11’th 2013, KSRegistry sent out a press release that the domain name AdamsNames.net had been transferred away by a third party (Ertan Ulutas) against the will of “Carsten Pauli, CEO of AdamsNames Ltd”. Both the control panel and the nameservers of these TLD’s (.gd, .tc and .vg) are dependant of the domain name AdamsNames.net. So this means the Ertan Ulutas is now completely running these three top level domains and KSRegistry has lost full control over them.

One day later, a press release was made on www.AdamsNames.net (now run by Ertan Ulutas), telling a different story. There it is stated that he is the real registry provider and that he has lost trust in KSRegistry (Key-Systems) and thus ended the cooperation with KSRegistry. According to this story, the domain name AdamsNames.com had actually been stolen by “minority shareholder Carsten Pauli” with the help of Key-Systems. Because of that, he has taken control over the technical management of the registry again and has moved AdamsNames.net to an other provider.

It’s hard to tell who’s who in this story and who is really in charge. One of the key people, Carsten Pauli, is being named as the CEO by one press release and only a “minority shareholder” by an other. The registry services are however now being run by Ertan Ulutas from within Turkey. The domain name AdamsNames.net is now registered in his personal name. It must be noted that AdamsNames Ltd is an English company and in all official information (also to whom .gd, .tc and .vg are delegated) an address in London is supplied. So it’s very unclear if Ertan Ulutas may indeed represent AdamsNames or not.