City of London Police keep sending domain name suspension requests to ISPs, but they are normally not welcomed. According to new information obtained via a Freedom of Information request sent by TorrentFreak to the police, a total of 70 requests were denied, with only 5 being granted. A few days ago, City of London Police caught the alleged operator of a number of proxy websites, claiming this move was a major success. However, it looks like other police anti-piracy efforts were far less effective.

As you may know, the British “Operation Creative” started with the sending of notifications to website owners, asking them to either go legit or suicide. Late in 2014, the operation was also followed by a campaign targeted at domain registrars, which asked them to suspend the domain names of some pirate websites. The police explained that if a website wouldn’t comply and engage with the police, they can use other tactical options – for example, the domain registrar could inform them of the criminality and seek suspension of the website.

The police have recently provided new insights into the effectiveness of these moves. It turned out that following its launch in the last quarter of 2013, the police sent notifications to the operators of 107 “notorious” websites. All of them were referred by entertainment industry bodies and include most of the popular file-sharing sites.

However, it is known that 109 domain names were referred to the police in total, which means that they for some reason decided to take no action against 2 of them. The reasons why these domains weren’t considered to be infringing were not provided.

Aside from contacting website owners directly, the police also approached domain name registrars with requests to suspend those infringing websites. Overall, the police sent out suspension requests for 75 domain names, but only 5 of them were granted, while the other 70 appeared denied.

Such low success rate (less than 7%) reveals that domain registrars can’t be convinced to suspend domains without a court order. In fact, all of them refused to grant, except the only registrar – PDR Ltd (Public Domain Registry). Unfortunately, this was the one we had our domain name registered with, so now you can reach us only at .cc domain. Some other file-sharing services also suffered from PDR.