The domain name CREFinancing.com has been reported by its owner, Mr. Abe Brand, as stolen. The perpetrator moved the stolen domain to Google Domains from GoDaddy.
The term “CRE financing” is quite valuable, hence the reason it was targeted:
Commercial real estate (CRE) lending includes acquisition, development, and construction (ADC) financing and the financing of income-producing real estate. Income-producing real estate includes real estate held for lease to third parties and nonresidential real estate that is occupied by its owner or a related party.
Mr. Brand is documenting the incident and his ongoing attempts to recover the domain CREFinancing.com; the domain’s transfer away from GoDaddy was not authorized by him and it happened while he was on vacation.
A couple of interesting points that we could uncover might help shed some light on how this unauthorized transfer away from GoDaddy might have taken place.
- First point: The party at loss used a pair of Yahoo and Live.com email addresses that exist in the Have I been Pwned database. This is an indication that the email password might have been weak and already shared among such accounts, available perhaps in the Dark Web.
- Second point: The domain’s DNS was changed temporarily on or around July 7, 2023. The DNS servers: ns1.Afternic.com & n2.Afternic.com
If there is one red flag, this is it, in our opinion.
There have been reports of unauthorized attempts to list and then sell domains on Afternic. While such attempts would typically target the money, this could be a case where the domain thief is targeting the domain itself.
We can only speculate on the method that could enable such a transaction to take place without the registrants explicit authorization but one thing comes to mind: Fast transfer.
GoDaddy most likely has all the logs regarding account access and also access to domain sales that might have taken place on its primary domain marketplace, Afternic. Of course, it could be a coincidence of sorts, in which case a compromised email would be the obvious culprit.
Domain theft is a serious crime depriving domain owners of their property and causing numerous problems to their personal and professional life.
