Can a DNS provider take action if a phishing attempt comes from one of their domains?

Question

I received a delightful phishing attempt:

Please keep this email for your crypto-currency records. Someone recently used your password to try to sign into your Wallet Accoun  (CASE ID:9098853964) We prevented this sign-in attempt, because this might be a criminal hacker that was trying to access your Bitcoin Account. Here are some details of the event: - Tuesday 17:45:29 AM UTC - IP Address:  107.145.285.2  (Moscow, Russia) If you did not try to access your Bitcoin wallet at that time, this was an unauthorized attempt and you should change your Wallet password immediately. Reset your password by CLICKING HERE Best Regards, BlockChain Team NOTE: If you do not want these warnings you can unsubscribe here (copyright BlockTeam 2016)  

(note the extremely interesting IP address: 107.145.285.2 - I guess in Soviet Russia IP address specifies specification)

The URLs specified in the email are registered through GoDaddy (I can add the domains here if that's appropriate), so I was wondering if GoDaddy has any responsibility or cares. Can DNS providers take action if they have phishing sites hosted on domains registered through them?

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Update: As I looked through the email headers I just noticed this little guy:

X-PHISHTEST: This is a phishing security test from KnowBe4 that has been authorized by the recipient organization

A quick search for KnowBe4 reveals that they're a security testing organization (or at least someone is making it look like them). So it looks like it was a phishing attempt but only by an organization that's hired to be nefarious.

Answer 1

I will reluctantly reserve comment on the trustworthiness of GoDaddy since you can look that up yourself.

But the DNS service has little responsibility. However, the hosting provider is a different matter - in some countries at least.

There is nothing stopping you reporting it, though, to the abuse mailbox for the GoDaddy registrar, it is possible they will take action, especially if lots of people do the same. If they have their act together, they might also pass on the information to other authorities that could aggregate such intelligence and the address may end up in a blocklist.

Howeverx2, you'd need to ask yourself whether you have the time to do this for each piece of spam you get through.

Answer 2

What responsibility would you throw on GoDaddy? They're just hosting DNS. How in the world would they be held liable for a phishing attempt?

Send them an abuse complaint if you're so inclined. It's not like they're actively investigating every domain registered through them for malicious behavior.