What happened to PayPoster.com? I shut it down!!!!

Ok so many of you know that PayPoster.com is gone, but not many of you know how, or why. Well I took it down.

It all started March 1st, when I saw a post from SegaMew that linked a change.org partition that talked about how there was this website named payposter.com that was stealing peoples art and selling it as their own. I can't art, so they never stole any of mine, but I can respect the amount of work that goes into artists projects. So I decided to use my computer skills to take the site down.

I started off by going to whois.icann.org where anybody can go to lookup the information of whoever owns a website. But as expected they used a masking service (a way to legally not show your information when registering a website), BUT I got the contact information of there registrar (where the bought payposter.com, and who manages the actual address) and also found out that it was located in the Bahamas. From this point I used Windows Command Prompt to run tracert AKA Trace Route, telling me every hop my computer makes to connect to the website, and the IP address of every hop. This lets me know the IP address of the website, and I can use that to find the hosting service that the website is ran off of. It turns out that the server that the website is on is located in the Ukraine, and, well, they don't speak much english there (I would assume) plus I can't make international calls, thus I can't call the phone number of the hosting service. So that was a dead end.

At this point I started typing an email to the registrar (I didn't know that anybody else did this at the time) that was just going to say 
"Hi I have been made aware by some of my artist friends that the website payposter.com is stealing artwork and photos from several sites across the internet and selling prints of them without the permission of the artists.

I looked into the website and found that it is registered through your service so I am sending an email to see if you are able to do anything about it."
but I decided to go look at the site one more time to see if I could find anything else on it, and lo and behold, about the second time I loaded the homepage there was a photo advertised named "12 year old naked" knowing this could get the site taken down I clicked on it, just long enough to verify that is what the photo was, and the photo turned out to be of two young boys having anal sex.

Let me stop here for a second. I only clicked on the photo to verify what it was so that I didn't just send a false claim to the registrar, I did not stay on the page for more than a few seconds, I did not save the photo, and I do not have any copy of the image in any form.


So at this point I typed the last part of the message
"Also as I looked through the website to try and find more information about it and I found that there is pitures of naked people labeled as underage, for an example there is a photo labeled "12 year old naked" showing 2 young boys having anal sex at the address payposter.com/poster/12-year-o…"

I am only placing the link here because the site is permanently down, otherwise I would never link the image

and then I sent the email to the registrar, about 5 minutes later I received an email back from the registrar
"Dear Justin,

The domain has been suspended.

Best regards..."

At this point I was unsure if this was just temporary to give them time to research the site (as I was still unaware that others contacted them) or if it was permanent so I asked
"Would you mind me asking if this is currently a temporary or permanent suspension?"
and the responded with
"Dear Justin,

The domain has been suspended and the DNS has been parked."
and that basically means that it won't ever be back, at least not at payposter.com that is.

At this point it was about 12:30 PM as I didn't start on this project until around 10:30 PM so I went off to bed.



The next day I messaged the person that made the change.com petition telling them that I had taken the site down, and never got a responce so I just ignored it.

Then today I decided to look around to see what other information might be out there on the site, and I found that other people did find and contact the registrar, but were unsuccessful at first, but then after my correspondence with the registrar got an email saying something like
"We have suspended the domain payposter.com as we found Child porn content on one of the URLs in the website.

 Best Regards..."

Most people just suspected that they did more research into the site and found it themselves and left it at that.





At this point I commented on some of the journal entries about the email responses from the registrar telling them in a brief summary that I was the one who got the site taken down, but when I discovered how many journal entries there was about it I decided just to make one of my own so people don't just write me off.




Here is a photo of the first few emails I had with the registrar
(I don't know how to add a photo so I just put it on amazon drive)
www.amazon.com/photos/share/ZR…



Anyway, have a good day everybody and let me know if you find another site that needs taken down!