How a Tiny Pacific Island Became the Global Capital of Cybercrime

Despite having a population of just 1,400, until recently, Tokelau's.tk domain had more users than any other country. Here's why: Tokelau, a necklace of three isolated atolls strung out across the Pacific, is so remote that it was the last place on Earth to be connected to the telephone-- only in 1997. Just three years later, the islands received a fax with an unlikely business proposal that would change everything. It was from an early internet entrepreneur from Amsterdam, named Joost Zuurbier. He wanted to manage Tokelau's country-code top-level domain, or ccTLD -- the short string of characters that is tacked onto the end of a URL. Up until that moment, Tokelau, formally a territory of New Zealand, didn't even know it had been assigned a ccTLD. 'We discovered the.tk,' remembered Aukusitino Vitale, who at the time was general manager of Teletok, Tokelau's sole telecom operator.

Zuurbier said 'that he would pay Tokelau a certain amount of money and that Tokelau would allow the domain for his use,' remembers Vitale. It was all a bit of a surprise -- but striking a deal with Zuurbier felt like a win-win for Tokelau, which lacked the resources to run its own domain. In the model pioneered by Zuurbier and his company, now named Freenom, users could register a free domain name for a year, in exchange for having advertisements hosted on their websites. If they wanted to get rid of ads, or to keep their website active in the long term, they could pay a fee.

In the succeeding years, tiny Tokelau became an unlikely internet giant -- but not in the way it may have hoped. Until recently, its.tk domain had more users than any other country's: a staggering 25 million. But there has been and still is only one website actually from Tokelau that is registered with the domain: the page for Teletok. Nearly all the others that have used.tk have been spammers, phishers, and cybercriminals. Everyone online has come across a.tk -- even if they didn't realize it. Because.tk addresses were offered for free, unlike most others, Tokelau quickly became the unwitting host to the dark underworld by providing a never-ending supply of domain names that could be weaponized against internet users. Scammers began using.tk websites to do everything from harvesting passwords and payment information to displaying pop-up ads or delivering malware.

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