Domain name theft is a serious issue
June 25th, 2008 — CyberCatWell, some people seem to try twice. Or at least their group tries twice. I got another phone call this morning, from some gal with the same accent as the guy that called me before, concerning the same domain name. The gal said that she wanted to send me a fax concerning the domain – She said that she was from “Domain Registry Support” and her name was “Tammi” (think that was name she gave, she evaded confirming when I tried to confirm what it sounded like).
Hmmmm.. Domain Registry Support is a rather vague nam, don’t you think? Particularly when the domain in question is registered in the United States and that is the second call I have received about it from people with definite foreign accents who are obviously trying to speak English as their second language. I’m elevating this from “possible scam” to “Oh yeah, these guys are fishing for something”.
As with the first call, I was asked if I had a fax. This time I quickly said that I don’t have one here, but I can see about getting a fax delivered to some place like Mail Boxes Etc. and pick the fax up there. She seemed uncertain but agreed she could call me back for the number of the place to send the fax to. It is soooooooo tempting to call the local Internet Scam dudes at my local police department – but since I am currently living with someone else and don’t know if the cops would need to be coming here or not, I am hesitant to subject the folks I live with to having to deal with the possibility of having police stomping through their house. If I was living in my own place — ohhhh yeah, I’d have been on the phone to my local PD the moment I hung up asking to speak to their Internet Crimes Division.
But, I really don’t expect her to call back anyway. I mean, hell, they’ve tried to snare me twice, they have to be getting the idea by now that even though I have a tasty looking domain sitting there – I’m not about to fall easily for some scammer trying to highjack my domain name out from under me.
Something I have learne, however, is that this is a more widespread problem than I had realized.
One site that caught my attention was Getting a stolen domain back (www.preventdomaintheft.com), a blog kept by Bjørn Kassøe Andersen of www.direction.dk. When Direction.dk’s .com domain (www.direction.com) was targeted by domain thieves, Andersen fought back. Find out why they fought back at the blog linked to above.
While I have not found any that are as famous as the sex.com, there are far more domain name thefts occurring than I would have guessed – and it is very easy for thieves to do. The story of sex.com can be found in a good article at eweek.com titled The Story of Sex.com, or check out Wikipedia’s entry for sex.com.
The scary part is, how easily so many of these thefts could have been prevented. One case highlighted in the 2003 TechWorld article titled “How to steal a domain name in easy stages“, the thief stole the domain DVDMovies.com after they created an obviously false driver’s license which they presented as verification that the domain was being transfered. Thankfully Arnold Jones, the owner of DVDMovies.com was able to sort it out and now has his real driver’s license on file with orders for none of his domains to be transfered without a perfect match on the license.
One other site that caught my attention today was www.DomainTheft.org, a site with the sole purpose of giving people a place to report domain name thefts. DomainTheft.org also brought another angle of this problem to my attention – credit card chargeback. This is where the thief buys the domain name from you legally on a domain name seller’s forum, then after they have it in their name – they chargeback their credit card to get the money they paid for the domain back – keeping control of the domain. DomainTheft.org has a list of recently stolen domain names, as well as reports on the identities of known scammers on popular domain name forums.
My best advice? Be careful and don’t give anyone any information about your domain. I know no one has to get anything on my domain, so I’m not about to fall for this scam these folks are trying to sneak past me. I hope you never fall for one either, but I’ll promise to have information here to help you get your identity (including your domain name) back if the worst should happen. And it can happen, even eBay guards against their valuable domain being highjacked and very recently PC Magazine covered the news that Pakistan launched an attack on YouTube.
