Mike Berkens over at TheDomains announced today that in the past several days, domains owned by MrsJello LLC – the company outfit of the late domain entrepreneur, Igal Lichtman – were being auctioned off on SnapNames and NameJet.
While some of us would have preferred to see the matter resolved with the Lichtman family prior to making any such public announcements, it seems that Mike’s post attracted the attention of both eNom representative, Bari Meyerson, and SnapNames/Moniker executive, Michele Van Tilborg.
They both announced that any ongoing auctions would be frozen and that expiring domains would be renewed, so that the family of Igal Lichtman would decide what to do with these valuable assets.
Later on, a post was made by someone who calls themselves ‘Anonymous’; we are presenting the message intact:
Michele Van Tilborg & The Other Moniker/SnapNames Crooks,
Your thoughts and prayers were not with Igal and his family, after all the hundreds of thousands of dollars in business he gave to you over the years. So please, for the sake of the dignity of Igal and the readers on this blog, call it how it is…at least Igal would respect that.
Beware of keeping names at Moniker, because they will be auctioned too soon. Other registrars that don’t have a sister auction house would have let the family redeem the domain for a much longer period of time. Snapnames took advantage of the situation, and they will suffer for that.
I can say that Bari from Enom and Matt from NameJet are a different story. ENOM AND NAMEJET ARE MUCH MORE CIVALIZED PEOPLE and worked with the family to solve problems, unlike Snapnames salting wounnds. Worst off, the SNAPNAMES account had money in it, they just claim the domain(s) was not on AUTO-RENEW!!!!
Anonymous has much more information on Snapnames. Anonymous suggests Snapnames makes it right while the domains are still under Moniker control. Anonymous suggests they do this for their own sake.
BE AWARE WHAT MONIKER/SNAPNAMES WILL DO WHEN YOU OR YOUR SPOUSE GETS SICK/DIES! God Forbid! I’m just saying.
Anonymous.
We are not sure whether this post was indeed posted by a member of the hacktivist group, Anonymous, but it does appear to voice a strong opinion on the initial reaction – or lack thereof – by SnapNames and Moniker, that auctioned off several domain names of MrsJello LLC. These domains are now in the hands of new owners.
In a discussion thread over at NamePros, a member of the domain community pointed out that the following LLL .com domains expired while being owned by MrsJello LLC, and were subsequently auctioned off at SnapNames:
ejz.com $4,100
xjc.com $4,501
zcu.com $5,502
zmk.com $4,600
zvw.com $4,200
fhz.com $4,810
fzo.com $4,969
Mike’s post attempts to raise awareness to the fact that digital assets are most often not properly administered when their owner dies. It is unfortunate that the domainer community is learning a hard lesson via the untimely demise of Igal Lichtman.
This post is 100% true!
