Beware of thieves with positive trust at Flippa.com
In February we uncovered a serial domain thief who successfully sold domain names on Flippa.com
The Australian domain marketplace has tightened its authentication rules but in the case of premium domain name AV.net it wasn’t so easy.
The thief simply emailed Flippa from the updated Administrative contact; the domain had been hijacked away from the account of its rightful owner at GoDaddy sometime in December 2010.
GoDaddy accounts are often easy targets due to the proliferation of emails that spoof GoDaddy’s login page, thus stealing account passwords.
We located the rightful owner and contacted them over the phone and provided information about their domain which was stolen and offered for sale on Flippa.com.
After that, it was an uphill struggle for the return of this premium and aged two letter .net
The thief had moved it to Register.com which currently appears to act very slowly with regards to processing such incidents. Despite the amount of proof provided by the rightful owner and GoDaddy, it took more than six months for the domain name to be returned.
This is yet another successful recovery of a stolen domain name, much like the GUI.com domain – now reunited with Dallas Mavericks owner, Mark Cuban.
Recovering stolen domain names requires patience, perseverance and silence; openly announcing the status of a domain one tries to recover can seriously hamper the recovery process which often leads to a stash of other stolen domain names.
