- Impact
- 308
It's the first time in my 19yr experience in the domain business that we get victims of a big fraud and I can't yet believe that, to be honest.
Well, in the first week of September I saw a domain auctioned at Flippa and I made a bid but the reserve didn't get met so the auction ended with the name unsold.
The auctioner approached me privately and proposed to close a deal out**** so we reached an agreement on a fair price and used Sedo.com for the private transaction (we had some credit there so we decided to use it despite the fact we paid a bit higher fee than on Escrow).
The transfer has successfully completed in few days so he proposed a second domain and we reached a fair agreement as well ... Again we used Sedo to close this deal and anything worked fine till Thursday when GoDaddy removed both names from our account by following an US court order.
Oh, we got shocked ! It seems this guy stolen both names from the original registrant and sold them fraudolently.
Well, we've lost an high $xx,xxx in favor of this scammer ... What next ?
Obviously we know nothing about him, we're aware of the identity theft fraud and similar stuff so, it's really worth investing on a legal action/investigation to try getting our money back ?
Obviously no, I'd say ... but I'd like to know your advice.
The only 'real data' is the bank account he has surely used to cash funds from Sedo so I've some questions here: let's suppose a judge should order Sedo rto reveal his bank account details then we should find a second judge belonging to that jurisdiction ready to order the bank to reveal their client details but what next ?
No bank account is anonymous, he might have used a nominee to open that account or who know what other dirty trick.
What's your thought ? It was really hard to suspect a fraud considering he was auctioning one of his domain at Flippa without being apparently in a rush to sell ...
But now I've other concerns regarding our future purchases too: let's say we find a domain listed with a fixed BIN of $200k on a public marketplace and we close a deal then few weeks later a court order force our registrar to move the domain back to his original registrant. How may we avoid similar frauds to happen again ? What should we do to prevent them ? Things are not so easier as in the past when all public details where listed in whois so it was easy querying whois history, calling the person who owned it till few months before (in case of a recent registrant change) and checking nobody stolen his name.
In the past we risked to be victims of a similar fraud but some lucky circumstances made as suspicious so we avoided it at the last second.
In that case, the hacker didn't change whois info (so there was no recent update to the whols record) because he gained control over the registrant email so it was very hard suspecting something was wrong there ...
Well, in the first week of September I saw a domain auctioned at Flippa and I made a bid but the reserve didn't get met so the auction ended with the name unsold.
The auctioner approached me privately and proposed to close a deal out**** so we reached an agreement on a fair price and used Sedo.com for the private transaction (we had some credit there so we decided to use it despite the fact we paid a bit higher fee than on Escrow).
The transfer has successfully completed in few days so he proposed a second domain and we reached a fair agreement as well ... Again we used Sedo to close this deal and anything worked fine till Thursday when GoDaddy removed both names from our account by following an US court order.
Oh, we got shocked ! It seems this guy stolen both names from the original registrant and sold them fraudolently.
Well, we've lost an high $xx,xxx in favor of this scammer ... What next ?
Obviously we know nothing about him, we're aware of the identity theft fraud and similar stuff so, it's really worth investing on a legal action/investigation to try getting our money back ?
Obviously no, I'd say ... but I'd like to know your advice.
The only 'real data' is the bank account he has surely used to cash funds from Sedo so I've some questions here: let's suppose a judge should order Sedo rto reveal his bank account details then we should find a second judge belonging to that jurisdiction ready to order the bank to reveal their client details but what next ?
No bank account is anonymous, he might have used a nominee to open that account or who know what other dirty trick.
What's your thought ? It was really hard to suspect a fraud considering he was auctioning one of his domain at Flippa without being apparently in a rush to sell ...
But now I've other concerns regarding our future purchases too: let's say we find a domain listed with a fixed BIN of $200k on a public marketplace and we close a deal then few weeks later a court order force our registrar to move the domain back to his original registrant. How may we avoid similar frauds to happen again ? What should we do to prevent them ? Things are not so easier as in the past when all public details where listed in whois so it was easy querying whois history, calling the person who owned it till few months before (in case of a recent registrant change) and checking nobody stolen his name.
In the past we risked to be victims of a similar fraud but some lucky circumstances made as suspicious so we avoided it at the last second.
In that case, the hacker didn't change whois info (so there was no recent update to the whols record) because he gained control over the registrant email so it was very hard suspecting something was wrong there ...
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