Wrong Route53 domain contact details

The symptoms

I recently received and email from Amazon Route53 asking me to verify the contact details for one of our registered DNS domains (replaced here with example.org). And sure enough, I saw wrong Route53 domain contact details in the email:

Subject: Confirm that contact information for example.org is correct.
Message body:

Dear AWS customer,

This message is a reminder to help you keep the contact information for your domain registration up to date. WHOIS records include the following information:

  Domains:
  example.org

  Registrant:
  Name: On behalf of example.org owner
  Organization Name: Identity Protection Service
  Address: PO Box 786
  City: Hayes
  State/Province: Middlesex
  Country: GB
  Postal Code: UB3 9TR

  Administrative Contact:
  Name: On behalf of example.org owner
  Organization Name: Identity Protection Service
  Address: PO Box 786
  City: Hayes
  State/Province: Middlesex
  Country: GB
  Postal Code: UB3 9TR
  Phone: +44.1483307527
  Fax: +44.1483304031
  Email: e793d865-97ab-42ab-805c-50cc36fd9202@identity-protect.org

  Technical Contact:
  Name: On behalf of example.org owner
  Organization Name: Identity Protection Service
  Address: PO Box 786
  City: Hayes
  State/Province: Middlesex
  Country: GB
  Postal Code: UB3 9TR
  Phone: +44.1483307527
  Fax: +44.1483304031
  Email: e793d865-97ab-42ab-805c-50cc36fd9202@identity-protect.org

The contact information provided above is what is shown in the public WHOIS. If your domain is privacy protected, the information will be different than the contact data you have submitted. To verify your contact information, please open the Amazon Route 53 console to view your current contact information and make any necessary corrections:
https://console.aws.amazon.com/route53/home#DomainDetail:example.org

If your information is accurate, you do not need to take any action.

Important
Under the terms of your registration agreement, providing false contact data can be grounds for the cancellation of your domain name registration.

Regards,
Amazon Route 53 

These wrong Route53 domain contact details originate from whois data for the registered domain. One might reasonably expect the whois data to match the contact details for AWS Route53 domain. However, in this case the Route 53 contact details were correct, but whois data seemed to be out of sync with those.

What is the underlying cause?

In retrospect the problem was a simple: AWS Route 53 Privacy Protection was enabled for this particular domain. That may have been immediately obvious if it were not for two things

• Why is AWS Route 53 even asking me to verify contact details of a privacy-protected domain?

• Privacy Protection contact info points to some random place in Great Britain. It is not obvious that the contact details are related to AWS.

Fortunately I was able to resolve this issue with help from AWS support in a few days. As usual, I needed to get through the first level support first, but then a more knowledgeable person provided the solution.

Wrong Route53 contact details: how to fix?

Wrong Route53 domain contact details are easy to fix. To show the correct contact information for a domain in whois queries you need to turn off Privacy Protection. Alternatively just keep on using Privacy Protection and ignore the domain contact detail verification emails from AWS Route53. As bonus you should receive less spam in your inbox with Privacy Protection turned on.

I hope this information helps other poor souls who have never heard of Privacy Protection before and get confused like I did. If you enjoyed this blog post you may be interested in our other AWS blog posts as well.

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