If you haven’t heard of the Iranian hackers that are notorious for hijacking domains, do a quick Google search for “iranian hacker DNForum“.
Every year, these folks from behind the Persian wall are causing serious damage to unprotected domains, using exploits or simply social engineering.
A few days ago we wrote how three valuable domain names – BQ.com, YCW.com and USD.net – were stolen and sold to an apparently unsuspecting buyer from China.
But even experienced domainers can fall victims to hackers that utilize European accounts in Denmark, Holland and Germany to pose as sellers of stolen assets and to divert funds to.
In the case of SOB.com the loss of several thousand dollars was not an issue to unsuspecting buyer, Chris Beach from Australia, when it came down to doing the right thing. Chris is an experienced, well-liked domain entrepreneur from down under, a guy who has been active on DNForum since the very beginning.
Owning such category killer domains as Surfer.com, Gurus.com, BulletinBoard.com and Aquatic.com, Chris Beach keeps a low profile with how he manages his domain projects.
After acquiring SOB.com from a seller who posed as the domain’s owner, Chris added the domain to the queue of domains for production; Chris’s strategy as a domainer commands for domain development, versus simple monetization, as he has shown with both BulletinBoard.com and Gurus.com
Some time later, after moving SOB.com from Dotster to his registrar of choice, Moniker, Chris received notification that the domain’s status was dubious. Despite his inquiries, there was no further action on behalf of the registrar for several months. It wasn’t until a lawsuit was filed in Florida on behalf of the rightful owners and the corporation “Sites of Boston” – a meaningful if not surprising expansion of the “SOB” acronym – that it was clear the allegations were correct.
Immediately after contacting the legal team challenging the SOB.com ownership, Chris did the right thing and handed over the domain, despite the sizable financial loss; as any ethical domainer would have done.
It’s unfortunate that the WHOIS data is not recorded in a centralized database, although last year there was a mention of Verisign planning a registry archive called “Domain Name WHOWAS” which would store live data and any change to the .com and .net domains would be recorded. This would assist with the recovery of stolen domain names; a task that currently is assisted by the historical WHOIS stored by DomainTools.
