The highly publicized sale of the domain, Monkey.com, was a lease-to-own transaction, that ended with the defaulting of the buyer on payments.
Monkey.com, a domain registered in 1994 by its current owner, MonkeyMedia, is back in the possession of its original registrant; a company called Monkey Capital failed to make monthly installments via Escrow.com, being late repeatedly.
The $500,000 dollar “sale” of Monkey.com thus generated a small revenue for its owner, and using Escrow.com demonstrates how such defaulting risk is avoided.
After defaulting on the Monkey.com payments, the Monkey Capital folks moved to M0nk3y.com, a domain that was acquired from HugeDomains in early November or late October.
M0nk3y.com
The pricing pattern of HugeDomains would indicate that it was sold for between $2000 – $3000 dollars.
The company went from a clean cut dictionary .com, to one with a “1337 h4xx0r” spelling; the “elite hacker” lingo of computer geeks.
If you’re not sure how “M0nk3y” is spelled: Instead of the letter “O” there is a zero, and the letter “E” is represented by the number three.
They also registered the following new gTLD domains, spelling out “monkey” the proper way:
monkey.computer
monkey.energy
monkey.guide
monkey.international
monkey.legal
monkey.limited
monkey.partners
monkey.support
Currently, all of them forward to M0nk3y.com. The disclaimer at the bottom of the pages still indicates that the web site is Monkey.com.
