ICANN controls the distribution of IP addresses, and accredits companies called domain name registrars to sell unique web- site names like Cartadmin.com and keep records of who owns them.

All these technical minutiae were about to become critical to Brill and Holdren’s understanding of Le Roux. Using an open-source service called DomainTools, they conducted background checks on the websites connected to RX Limited, tracing their IP ad- dresses and the histories of who had registered them and where. The back-end sites, Cartadmin.com and SystemsCA.com, traced to a domain registrar operating in the Philippines called ABSys- tems. That in and of itself wasn’t particularly illuminating—ICANN accredits registrars all over the world. But there was something off about ABSystems. For one thing, the company didn’t seem to offer a way for the public to actually purchase domains. ABSystems’ own web page was empty except for a login page. Wondering what other websites were connected to the company, the investigators flipped around their search, querying DomainTools for every site regis- tered through ABSystems. The list was astonishing:

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