Tvm: If you are planning to check out the Kerala Police website for some information, this one can be a bouncer. In case you check out keralapolice.com, which you might in all probability, you will reach a website called Manna Express which contains religious material and not the police related stuff you were looking for. Same hold true for keralapolice.net. And if you try out keralapolice.info or keralapolice.in, you get to see some ads, courtesy the host company which has parked these domains.
The official homepage of Kerala Police is keralapolice.org and was created on May 26, 1999. Now what is baffling is that Keralapolice.com and keralapolice.net have been around for almost ten years now. These two websites were created on April 29, 2000 and have been renewed promptly over these years.
Though a formal complaint is yet to be made, sources in the Cyber Police Station said that senior Police Officials including the IG were made aware of the existence of these websites about three or four years back but nothing has happened on this front. They also added that they have not been able to contact the owner of keralapolice.com and keralapolice.net. The ‘Contact Us’ page on this website does not work.
A ‘Whois’ enquiry by Kerala IT News revealed that these domains belong to William Baby, based in New York with the address 130-12-97th Ave, Richmond Hill, NY 11419 and telephone number 718-300-8865 which is a T-Mobile cell phone. The email id given during registration is williamandgracy @ hotmail.com. These domains are registered with Directnic Ltd, a service provider based in Cayman Islands. We also found that Willam Baby owns 30 other domains with this registrar.
Though this is can be a case of cyber squatting, Kerala Police can take solace in the fact that there is no malicious content on the site. But it’s quite puzzling why a person in US, who is most probably from Kerala, has registered two domain names with the popular extensions of Kerala Police. Officials say the actual motive can only be established after talking to the website owner.
The story does not end here. We decided to check out the other available extensions of this domain name. Keralapolice.info is registered with Domaincontrol.com by Jyothikumar R from Dubai (PO Box 23033, Dubai Phone: 502897217) and was created on October 01, 2009. Incidentally Jyothikumar owns 17 other domains with this registrar while his email id r.jyothikumar @ gmail.com is associated with 88 domains. Keralapolice.in is owned by a company in Brazil which created it on November 30, 2006.
According to senior Police Officials, there isn’t much they can do given the fact that the domain names are registered outside India and it’s hosted on servers outside India. If the domain name was of a registered business establishment, then it could have been considered as a legal copyright or trademark violation but in the case of a government department, there are no such rules. The Indian IT Act has its limitations in dealing with such cases.
But whatever said and done, we hope the concerned persons are booked and the domain names are restored to the right owner. That reminds me, keralapolice.com and keralapolice.net domain names are up for renewal on April 29, 2010.
Anil Philip
Kerala IT News
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You cannot "book" any one for registering a domain name. probably it will work in India, but not in other places. Either you can buy from them or can through icann and try to get it. But there is a country specific extension called "IN" for India. they can get keralapolice.in so what is the problem.