Registrar handed over my details on ONE complaint — moving nine names, where to?

A registrar I have used for several years responded to a single unverified complaint by supplying the complainant with the registrant details behind the privacy service. No court order, no notice to me, no opportunity to respond. I found out because the complainant wrote to the address they were given.

I now need to move nine names off it, and I would rather not repeat the mistake.

The question is narrow: which registrars have a published position on this specific behaviour, and has anyone here tested it? I am less interested in WHOIS masking than in what the company does when someone asks nicely.

Which TLDs, and are any of them currently under an active complaint? Both change what you can even do right now.

This is the failure everyone plans least for, and it's the most common one.

Almost all of the attention in this corner goes to whether a registrar will act — suspend, delete, transfer. Disclosure is quieter, cheaper for them, invisible to you, and it is the thing that actually reaches your front door. A registrar can hand over a file in four minutes with one junior employee and no legal process at all, and nothing in the public record ever shows it happened.

The structural defence is not a better privacy toggle. It is not being the registrant. If the company's file says the company's name, there is nothing to disclose to a person who asks nicely, because the answer to "who owns this" is "we do" and that answer is true.

nullroute has described Njalla's model and I'd name it, because for the specific failure you hit it is the only structural answer rather than a policy promise.

Njalla registers the name in their own name and you hold it through them. There is no privacy service masking your details, because your details are not in the registration. A complainant writing in gets told the domain belongs to Njalla, which is accurate. Their whole public history is built on not being cooperative with informal requests, and they have been doing it long enough that there'd be reports here if that had changed. €15 a year for a .com, Monero accepted, contact field is an email or XMPP and that is all they ask for.

The cost is real and you should weigh it before moving nine names into it. You do not own the domain in the ordinary sense. Transferring out later is deliberately awkward, and if you and Njalla ever disagree about anything, you are a customer of a Swedish company rather than a registrant with a contract the registry recognises. People move in for the privacy and then discover the exit is narrow.

If that trade is wrong for you, then 1984 or OrangeWebsite in Iceland is conventional ownership with a jurisdiction that makes informal disclosure less likely — but "less likely" is a policy, not a structure, and policies change with management.

I'll be the contradiction on this one because I've actually tried to leave.

Moved two names to Njalla in 2022 for exactly the reasons above, and they were faultless on the thing they promise — nobody ever got anything about me from them. In 2024 I wanted one of the names out, to a normal registrar, for a project that needed conventional ownership for boring commercial reasons.

It took nine weeks. Not because they refused; they didn't refuse, and they answered eventually every time. It's that the mechanism is a support conversation rather than an auth code you paste into another registrar, and every step of it happens at their pace. If you are moving nine names and you might ever want them somewhere else, understand you are doing this nine times, by hand, on someone else's schedule.

Would I use it again? For a name I'll never move, yes. For a portfolio, I would not put all nine there.

Nine weeks for one name. Was that a single transfer, or did you have several open at once?

One. That's what made it feel long.

Split them. Three registrar, three name each. Then no single company can ruin your whole week, and you find out who is good with small damage instead of big.

This is the advice I'd give too and it's boring enough that people skip it.

Nine names at one registrar is nine names with one policy, one support team and one bad Tuesday. Three at 1984, three at a proxy model, three somewhere cheap you're willing to lose — you learn which one behaves under real conditions without betting the portfolio on the answer.

Also worth checking before you move anything: names transferred within the last 60 days are locked, and several registrars apply their own lock on top. If any of the nine were touched recently you're not moving them this month regardless of where you'd like them to go.

Before the transfers: export every zone, and check the TTLs. FWIW a nine-name migration with 86400 TTLs is a two-day outage you scheduled yourself without noticing.

Worth noting the OP hasn't come back, and the two questions that would have determined the answer — which TLDs, and whether anything is under an active complaint — never got answered.

Which is its own lesson. Half the "which registrar" threads on this board are unanswerable as asked, and we answer them anyway.

He got what he came for in post four and left. That's most of the burner accounts here.