Little Acorns Fostering, a fostering agency in the UK, lost control of their domain littleacornsfostering.com; the current registrant wants 9,000 GBP to release it.
Naturally, the company is upset, and its founder, Cheryl Jillions, calls the act “despicable:”
“There are horrible people out there doing this just to make money and the police can’t do anything about it. It is absolutely despicable.”
The agency says they “aren’t sure” how they weren’t notified about the domain’s renewal status, which they registered 5 years ago. They’re now concerned about the content that might be displayed by the new owners, and are seeking legal advice.
“I would rather go through the legal process and pay a solicitor than put money in his pocket.”
So who is to blame for the domain’s expiration?
We did some investigating into the domain’s ownership in recent years, and the result might shock Ms. Jillions.
Between 2012 and up until the domain’s expiration in 2017, littleacornsfostering.com was controlled by the email address cheryl.jillions@millhousedata.com.
So why didn’t Ms. Jillions receive notifications about the Little Acorns Fostering domain at her obvious email address?
Looking up the current status of millhousedata.com it displays Japanese content, having been picked up in early 2017 by someone from Japan.
By losing access to the MillHouseData.com domain, which was founded by a Michael Jillions – presumably, related to Ms. Jillions – the latter would not receive email notifications about littleacornsfostering.com.
It gets more interesting.
Up until 2015, the domain MillHouseData.com was controlled by an email under the domain Pomdesign.com – most likely, the firm that developed it. That changed in 2016, when Pom Design became Posh Duck. A year later, they became Alate Creative.
These changes could have led to the demise of the domain MillHouseData.com in late 2015. New Ventures, the domain portfolio arm of Network Solutions, picked up and held the domain for a year, before releasing it in 2017.
Moral of the story: always ensure your domains are under an email address that you can fully control; never in the hands of developers or other third parties.
Luckily, Little Acorns Fostering moved to littleacornsfostering.co.uk.
It seems they are still adverting the ENQUIRIES@LITTLEACORNSFOSTERING.COM email address on their home page.
#FAIL
“Michael’s role in Little Acorns lies in corporate affairs ensuring the accounting and finance, IT and back-office management is properly controlled.”