Does WHOIS privacy actually stop spam?
Identical domains registered the same day at the same registrar. The only difference is whether the registrant's contact details are public. Each domain has its own phone number and email address, and every call, text, email and letter that reaches them is counted here.
Contacts per domain since registration
Cumulative calls, texts, emails and letters, averaged across the domains in each group so groups of different sizes compare fairly.
By channel
Contacts per domain per week, by how they arrived.
Domains
Domain names and registration dates are withheld until the experiment ends, so readers can't contact them and skew the results.
Latest contacts
Sender numbers and addresses are masked: caller ID is often spoofed and may belong to an uninvolved person.
Method
- Each domain lists a unique phone number, email address and mailing address as its registrant contact. Those details are used nowhere else.
- Phone numbers were bought 1–2 weeks before registration. Calls in that window are a baseline of recycled-number noise and are excluded from the totals above.
- The domains have no MX records and no contact forms, so anything that arrives had to find the WHOIS/RDAP contact or the privacy proxy's forwarding address.
- "Via proxy" emails are those relayed by the registrar's privacy forwarding service.
- Calls are answered with a recording notice. Categories are assigned by keyword rules on transcripts and subjects, then reviewed by hand.