Wierd network uncovered - areasearch.com

[Mr. Deleted]

First, I had a problem with a client and spam, no it was not my client spamming, it was made to LOOK like my client was, so my host suspented the domain. I then did the research on the real spammer, and in doing so, I came across and unrelated network of 12,307 domains on one IP address.

The first domain I found was http://garbler.net/, and when I checked the whois it all seemed legit, a company called GracieMedia.com, and I went to the site, assuming that it was a domain holding company, but turned out to be a advertising agency.

But the Garbler.net site, when I clicked on a link to an advertiser, opened the page in an iframe, which is not good business, and the advertiser does not get real traffic that way, so if this is PPC, the advertisers are loosing.

So I called Gracie Media, and told them this. They were suprised that they supposedly owned this garbler.net domain name. And not to mention that the whois address on the domain is from an old address from 3 years ago.

Annie Coryat from Gracie Media is vary concerned about this, and told me to help her shut this domain down, as it is useing her name in the whois.

I then did a reverse IP search for this domain and found 12000 more domains in this IP, all seem to look the same, but the whois seems all to be different for each one.

So who is running this network of 12,000 domains, and why are they useing fake whois for that many domains? They almost look like a google search results page, and probably get a lot of cross linked traffic, but why not use legit email and contact info for such a network?

http://www.domaintools.com/reverse-ip/?hostname=garbler.net

(ip: 63.118.11.117)

http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=ip:63.118.11.117&FORM=MSNH

BTW, areasearch.com is the only ".com" that I could see on this network, all seem to be .net even if the .com is available

 

[JMJ]

It's registered at Moniker. May be a new parking page of theirs?

 

[Mr. Deleted]

no, it appears to be a private site, with google ads on some sites, but on the others, it has another private ad feed, which as I said, links inside the iframe, so the advertiser is getting nothing for their ad dollar, which is really click fraud in a sense. I would not want to pay for such an ad and be stuck inside an iframe:

http://www.slabaugh.org/adsiniframe.gif (http://www.gototrafficschool.com is in the frame here) http://garbler.net/728_90_leaderboard.php is the link to the frame where the ad is on.


As for moniker making such a page and making the ads not fully show, that would be hugh in itself.