group of about 400 companies, all with similar address and contact information based in New York, each registered as an LLC; in his opinion, these were phantom registrars "created to hijack the .EU landrush." These "phantom" registrars effectively had hundreds of opportunities of registering a domain whereas a genuine registrar effectively only had one opportunity to register the same domain. Thus some registrants were crowded out of the .eu landrush process and many generic .eu domain names are now owned by the companies using these "phantom" registrars. Patrik Lindén, spokesman for EURid at the time, denied the allegations by Parsons, stating that "[EURid] verified that each registrar was an individual legal entity. Each had to sign an agreement with us, and prepay €10,000." Parsons didn't dispute that each registrar was a separate legal entity, but noted that creating such entities was trivial: "Mr. Linden seemed proud that the EURid registry verified that each applicant was a legal entity before it was accredited. Take a moment and think about what that means. You can form a "legal entity" for $50 – an LLC – and you are good to go. Is that what we want a registry to do? Don't we want them instead to make sure that the organization it allows to provide end-users with its domain names – especially Europe's very own domain name – are actually in the domain name registration business?" Others claimed that .eu domain had been actively targeted during the sunrise period by speculators using fast-track Benelux trademarks to create prior rights on various high-value generic terms and during the landrush by speculators using EU front companies in the UK and Cyprus to register large numbers of domains. While speculative activity occurred with the launch of other domains, it was the scale of the activity that called into question the competence of EURid in protecting the integrity of eu ccTLD. The EURid organisation investigated some allegations of abuse, and in July 2006 announced the suspension of over 74,000 domain names and that they were suing 400 registrars for breach of contract. The status of the domains was changed from active to on-hold. This meant that the domains could not be moved or have their ownership changed. The registrars also lost their access to the EURid registration database meaning that they could no longer register .eu domain names. The legal action relates to the practice of