Whois Compliance Emails

Several of our clients have received emails from eNom in the last 24 hours about supposed WHOIS compliance issues:

From: whoiscompliance@enom.com [mailto:whoiscompliance@enom.com]
Sent: 06 January 2010 00:03
To: info@xxxxxxxx.com
Subject: Whois Day 60 / Freeze Notification Letter – Immediate action required for domain xxxxxxx.com

Dear xxxx xxxx,

As your registrar of record, eNom, Inc requests your immediate attention regarding your domain, xxxxxxxx.com.

eNom, Inc, as a US-based company, must comply with US laws.
These laws prohibit us from providing services to Cuba, Iran, and Sudan (“Sanctioned Countries”).

Based on the information available to us, some or all of the “whois” contact information for
your Domain is within a Sanctioned Country. As you may know, the “whois” contact information
for a domain includes the billing contact information, the registrant contact information,
the administrative contact information, the technical contact information, and, if applicable,
the auxiliary billing contact information for the domain.

Therefore, we have concluded that your Domain may be controlled by a person located in a Sanctioned Country.

Effective immediately you are no longer permitted to perform financial transactions for your Domain.
Features such as registration renewal and auto-renew have been disabled until you update your contact information.

Kind regards,

eNom Compliance

Email address: whoiscompliance@enom.com

Unfortunately the email is not a scam.

If you have got one of these emails please contact support@blacknight.com as soon as you can and we will assist you.

Although we are an ICANN accredited registrar, a lot of domains that we
manage for clients are managed through another registrar, eNom.

We intend to move those domains to our own accreditation as soon as possible in order to avoid future issues.

We are currently checking ALL domains on our account with eNom to ensure that the country code is set correctly.

We believe, however, that this issue is due in part to a technical error.

Ireland when converted to the ISO code is normally presented as “IE” or “ie”.
We suspect that at some point in the past some  domains’ whois was converted from “Ireland” to “IR”, which is the country code for Iran.