From what I can tell, some person made a fan page for an existing Funko Pop video game (Funko Fusion), with links to the official site and screenshots of the game. The BrandShield software is probably instructed to eradicate all "unauthorized" use of their trademark, so they sent reports independently to our host and registrar claiming there was "fraud and phishing" going on, likely to cause escalation instead of doing the expected DMCA/cease-and-desist. Because of this, I honestly think they're the malicious actor in all of this. Their website, if you care: https://www.brandshield.com/
About 5 or 6 days ago, I received these reports on our host (Linode) and from our registrar (iwantmyname). I expressed my disappointment in my responses to both of them but told them I had removed the page and disabled the account. Linode confirmed and closed the case. iwantmyname never responded. This evening, I got a downtime alert, and while debugging, I noticed that the domain status had been set to "serverHold" on iwantmyname's domain panel. We have no other abuse reports from iwantmyname other than this one. I'm assuming no one on their end "closed" the ticket, so it went into an automatic system to disable the domain after some number of days.
I've been trying to get in touch with them via their abuse and support emails, but no response likely due to the time of day, so I decided to "escalate" the issue myself on social media.
My hosting party (Hetzner) forwarded the emails and / or put it in their own system, I removed the offending images / page, replied to the email, and done, right? Wrong, the email said I had to fill in a statement through some online form somewhere; I did that too late and got more and more threatening emails like "pack your shit we're evicting you in 24 hours". Nobody seemed to actually read my replies / explanation, probably because this is so routine for them.
And I get it, nobody can be arsed to read longwinded explanations and the like for routine operations. I hope AI assisted tooling will help the overworked support employees with making decisions in favor of giving people the benefit of the doubt and the help they need; for them it's routine, but for me it was the first time I got anything like that.