Domain name from Danish political party Liberal Alliance taken over by Chinese
The Danish domain la-aalborg.dk, which was previously owned by a local branch of the Danish political party Liberal Alliance, has been re-registered by a resident of China.
Henrik Bjørner, owner of consultancy firm EIT, has previously documented that a disproportionately large number of expired Danish internet domains are being re-registered by persons with a relation to China. The re-registered domains are often being used as fraudulent web shops offering non-existent or counterfeited copies of known brands.
In the case of la-aalborg.dk no web shop has been set up. Rather, an older version of the site, apparently retrieved from the Wayback internet archive, has been uploaded. According to Henrik Bjørner of EIT, it is not uncommon for respected web sites to be cloned in an attempt to take advantage of existing user trust and search engine ranking of the domain. Often the sites are then laced with links to dubious web shops, giving the impression that those shops are recommended and trusted by the previous site owners.
In the case of la-aalborg.dk, the previous owners of the domain had chosen to close their web page in order to move their communication to Facebook. As a response to this story, Liberal Alliance Aalborg has said that they will contact Danish TLD administrator DK Hostmaster about the case. This is not likely to make any difference, however, as DK Hostmaster, while acknowledging concerns over the potentially illegal use of Danish internet domains, does not investigate whether a domain is being used for illegal purposes. Such cases should instead be referred to the legal authorities.