Within the past 48 hours it came to light that there were some very high end adult domain names being sold on DNF that were in fact stolen. I wont post them here as they may be inappropriate, but a substantial amount of money appears to have been lost (upwards of several hundred thousand). Please be advised to conduct due diligence when buying domain names!
Most commonly, I believe, they are paying with stolen accounts and/or reversing charges. Not only PayPal too, I've been checking some of these hackers sites and they list stolen bank account info too. Anything that is worth any good amount of money has to be escrowed these days.
Even if you are buying a domain listed on a service like SnapNames.com and the whois shows "Senior Account Rep Snapnames.com" means that it's a user submitted domain and still could be a stolen domain. Afternic.com, TDNAM.com, eBay.com, Sedo.com etc all could be places stolen domains can be listed for sale, so do not think just because a domain is listed on one of these sites, that you are "safe".
If you have your account at a registrar, I stronly suggest you use a domain for your email and that email address on your registrar account.
Also, 9MM was in the master mind of this and he was or is a member HERE! I am not fully sure if that is his user name here a not?
he was on DNF a week or so ago.. also was a mod at Nameslot.. I questioned their choice and was contacted by another mod (np member) who was going to make the owners aware.. not sure what happened after that.. I knew something was fishy with him the first 10 mins he joined ..was in chat and myself and another member i remember Pm'd each other questioning his motives
Ok, so let me ask this then: Say you buy a domain and you use an escrow service. Are you protected, or are you at risk of your investment, i.e. could you lose the domain you bought with the escrow service without getting your money back?
Correct. If a domain is stolen and the original registrant files grievance with the registrar. The registrar May take the domain name back. Always make sure you use due diligence in making sure who ever is selling you the domain names, actually owns it.
Nothing is ever 100% safe. You can use escrow and if the domain you purchased was stolen, yes, you will lose the domain, because the rightful owner did not sell it to you and it's also likely you will NOT get your money back either. Here is a recent story of when this happened. It's stated at the bottom of the story about not getting the money back.
Now each case would be unique via Escrow, but you will NOT get your money back most of the time. At times, you can get your money back, but it can be after a very long period of time.
If you are the Seller, the money will be protected the most. So when you are selling, Escrow is near 100% safe route to go.
I was just wondering is all this scamming recent or has it been around? I recently started domaining in late November. I don't remember seeing all these scams back then, but over the past month or so I've heard about alot of people being scammed.
