Any way to get a domain that even the brokers cant find?

[JonBeard]

Hey guys,

Noobie here, so please forgive me for my stupidity. My experience is in hosting, networking and datacenters. I have a client of mine that his whole branding identity is based off this name. He went viral in 2014 on YouTube, and someone registered his username.com domain 3-4 months afterwords. We attempted to go through DomainAgents but not even them could figure out the domain owner through GoDaddy's WHOIS protector.

Are there any other routes we can take to find the owner of this domain or?? The domain right now is being used to deliver viruses/pop ups once accessed. I could go my route and continuously submit abuse reports for their hosting providers, and hope they eventually just get tired of it and let the domain expire. Doesnt make sense to pay for 5 years on a domain, without intent to sell or use.

Thanks for your suggestions!

 

[MadAboutDomains]

Hello, welcome to NP.

It can be frustrating when this happens. It's certainly not unusual for someone to keep a domain and not use it for anything and keeping a domain that someone knows someone else might be interested in (you) is reason in itself to keep a name ticking over.

They obviously don't have to reply to you and it sounds like they are exercising this right if you and others (a broker) have tried sending mail via the listed whois privacy mail address as eluded to in your post.

Depending on the age of the name, you might be able to find the ownership history for the name, check out whoxy.com, though there are other services that others can probably tell you about that I can't remember right now.

Depending on the level of the rights that you have, you could use these rights to ask the whois privacy company to reveal the owner details. Generally you need genuine provable rights prior to the registration of the name in order to persuade them to surrender the details, like a trademark.

Failing that, a further option is UDRP. This may force a response from the name owner if they want to defend the name... but you should fully understand the implications of doing this. It costs and is a mechanism to prise a domain from it's owner due to bad faith usage - IE someone knowingly preventing a rights holder from reflecting their trademark in a domain.

I hope that this helps, sorry there is no silver bullet or easy option.

 

[JonBeard]

Thank you very much @MadAboutDomains for the time you spent writing your response. I will check out the different options you have presented.

 

[creataweb]

If it's at GD let's ask @Joe Styler - maybe GD has a broker service for this (I don't know personally.)

 

[Joe Styler]

I will preface this with the fact that I am not a lawyer and this is not legal counsel. Unless the domain had a trademark on it prior to the registration you're almost certain to waste your time and money in a UDRP. You should get a lawyer who knows how to do a UDRP and filing one costs money so you are looking at thousands to try that route.
I know we can get to a person if they have privacy and make an offer to buy the domain through our domain buy service. It costs $69.99 and then if we are successful 20% of the final agreed on price for the domain. We have an excellent team so it is worth a shot.
But not knowing the name and going off what you are describing it does not seem like a reasonable person so I would expect the domain price to be highly inflated.

 

[JonBeard]

Thank you @Joe Styler for your insight. I would agree, that we are likely on the route to try and appease this guy or just wait him out (but being that its been 5 years, I am hoping we can get his attention). I will check out the GoDaddy route.

Thanks again!