Backpage.com Domain & Website Seized by Feds

On Friday, federal authorities of the United States of America put up a notice on backpage.com that the domain name and its affiliated websites have been seized.

Backpage.com Domain Seized

Inspection of the nameservers show the following recent changes:

ns1.seizedservers.com. [‘66.212.148.117’]
ns2.seizedservers.com. [‘66.212.148.118’]

For those in U.S. areas where the DNS hasn’t propagated yet, the domain is still redirecting to us.backpage.com

Old Backpage Homepage

The seizure notice reads:

As part of an enforcement action by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division, with analytical assistance from the Joint Regional Intelligence Center.

Other agencies participating in and supporting the enforcement action include the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section. the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, the office of the California Attorney General, and the office of the Texas Attorney General.

Additional information will be provided at around 6:00 pm EST on Friday, April 6, by the U.S. Department of Justice, and all media inquiries should be directed to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Public Affairs at 202-514-2007 and [email protected].

April 6, 2018


For years, Backpage.com (previous owner of L.A. Weekly) has been known as a classified-ads website and job marketplace where in recent months, sex workers have been turning to accepting cryptocurrency for payment.