Domain thieves often prey on active bloggers.
Hesham Zebida is the founder of a bloggers community called “Famous Bloggers” and a few days ago two of his most valuable domain names, registered at GoDaddy, were stolen.
The thief then tried to blackmail Zebida into buying his domains, FamousBloggers.net and ThesisAwesome.com, for $999 – after they were moved away from GoDaddy to another registrar.
GoDaddy basically told Zebida that the thief logged into his account and transferred out the domains.
Zebida speculates that someone at GoDaddy conspired and assisted the thief, but he provides no such proof.
After four sleepless nights, Zebida’s domains were recovered, and he provides a testimonial of how he successfully did that.
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Wow.
This is really scary stuff, especially if this was an inside job.
More than that, Godaddy’s cavilier attitude is shocking and upsetting.
I have a good rep, but still…
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Ms Domainer – The most common cause of domain hijacking is when one’s account is hacked, due to phishing: emails that look as if they came from the registrar, when they are in fact hosted in rogue sites.
Always log into your registrar’s web site directly, never via an email link!
Thanks for sharing the story.
I am not accusing GoDaddy staff, as you mentioned that’s just a possibility and a conclusion based on what I see and read on the web about the repeatedly stolen domains from GoDaddy’s accounts.
Anyways, they now have a two-step authentication, but still most of people don’t use it, and I hope they do!