Early on March 17, 2017 DotWeekly broke the news that Abbvie Pharmaceuticals domain name Vicodin.com had been seized by the US governments Homeland Security ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).
A total of 838 domain names were seized that day (full list in original story), with Vicodin.com being one of them.
I had a hunch that Vicodin.com was seized by mistake, simply because Abbvie owns the Vicodin trademark and the website is the official site providing information for the narcotic medication, which Abbvie manufactures.
By around 4:15 PM CST on March 17, 2017 I had noticed DNS activity on Vicodin.com, moving from the ICE owned SeizedServers.com name server, going back to Abbvie.com controlled DNS. At that time, the domain name was released by ICE and potentially showing the error that took place.
Registry whois indicates those DNS name server changes that took place on the 17th back to Abbvie DNS away from SeizedServers.com:
In general, that was an extremely fast “fix” and much shorter than the 20 months it took Rojadirecta.org domain to be returned in 2012 for an example.
EFF.org brings up many valid points in a related article on the apparent wrongful seizure of the Vicodin.com domain name.
It would be nice if Abbvie provided comment on this wrongful seizure of the domain name and what took place to get it back so quickly. Sadly, they opened my email 41 times and have yet to reply asking for comment.
ICE are a bunch of thieves that steal legitimate people’s and companies’ assets.