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For those of you that are unfamiliar with DTVS, it stands for Domain Transfer Verification Service and it's a security feature that is available to premier services accounts at GoDaddy. When DTVS is activated on an account, a GoDaddy rep has to phone an account holder to get verbal authorization for every domain being transferred out. The point of it is to add an extra layer of protection against domain theft.
I had been hesitating to activate it because it seems like a bit of a headache but after reading about so many domains being stolen, I finally decided to give it a test. Sadly, I have to report that it failed me on the very first transfer.
I sold a domain last week for $2.1K using escrow.com. The buyer paid for the domain and once the payment was approved, I had him initiate a transfer to his registrar in Australia ( he refused to open a Godaddy account so I couldn't get it to him with a simple push). As expected, I received the authorization request from his registrar and I approved it. The only thing left to do was to authorize it on GD's end, and the deal would have been completed last Wednesday. Unfortunately that last step never happened due to a glitch with Godaddy's DTVS system.
Apparently, once the transfer request gets to GD, a support ticket is supposed to automatically get generated which prompts a GD rep to make the authorization phone call. In this case, however, no ticket was generated. After waiting 12 hours and never receiving a call, I contacted GD and was informed that there was a problem with the ticket generation part of the process and that THERE WAS NO WAY TO MOVE FORWARD WITH THE TRANSFER! The only way they could resolve the problem was for them to completely reset the transfer and have it start over. This meant that the status of the domain at GoDaddy would be changed from "pending transfer" to "active" and that I'd have to contact my buyer and ask him to resubmit the transfer request.
The implications of GoDaddy's "fix" was a) that I was made to appear incompetent and unprofessional right in the midst of deal and b) that my deal went from being a done deal to one where my buyer would be given a fresh opportunity to cancel the transaction if he so desired. I also had to rely on him to get things moving again.
The good news is that my customer was cooperative. The bad news is that his registrar had no way to resubmit the transfer request until the first one was cancelled and they had no way to cancel the existing one. The problem is that even though the status had been reset at GoDaddy's end, the status with the registry remained "pending transfer" and as long as that's the case no new transfer request can be submitted on this domain. It currently appears as though GoDaddy is unable to reset the status at the registry level and that the only way it will change is to wait for the pending transfer to lapse ( nobody can tell me how long that takes ). Meanwhile, my buyer is set to leave on a trip this Wednesday which means that if the transfer doesn't happen before he leaves, it won't happen until mid January! Of course, this means a few more weeks where he has the opportunity to change his mind.
So, the bottom line is that what you get with DTVS is that instead of losing money on stolen domains, you might lose money on sales whenever GD's DTVS system fails. Nice trade-off, huh? Does their DTVS system fail often? I have no idea. I just know that it failed for me 100% of the time that I used it. Needless to say, I'm not very happy with GD at the moment.
I had been hesitating to activate it because it seems like a bit of a headache but after reading about so many domains being stolen, I finally decided to give it a test. Sadly, I have to report that it failed me on the very first transfer.
I sold a domain last week for $2.1K using escrow.com. The buyer paid for the domain and once the payment was approved, I had him initiate a transfer to his registrar in Australia ( he refused to open a Godaddy account so I couldn't get it to him with a simple push). As expected, I received the authorization request from his registrar and I approved it. The only thing left to do was to authorize it on GD's end, and the deal would have been completed last Wednesday. Unfortunately that last step never happened due to a glitch with Godaddy's DTVS system.
Apparently, once the transfer request gets to GD, a support ticket is supposed to automatically get generated which prompts a GD rep to make the authorization phone call. In this case, however, no ticket was generated. After waiting 12 hours and never receiving a call, I contacted GD and was informed that there was a problem with the ticket generation part of the process and that THERE WAS NO WAY TO MOVE FORWARD WITH THE TRANSFER! The only way they could resolve the problem was for them to completely reset the transfer and have it start over. This meant that the status of the domain at GoDaddy would be changed from "pending transfer" to "active" and that I'd have to contact my buyer and ask him to resubmit the transfer request.
The implications of GoDaddy's "fix" was a) that I was made to appear incompetent and unprofessional right in the midst of deal and b) that my deal went from being a done deal to one where my buyer would be given a fresh opportunity to cancel the transaction if he so desired. I also had to rely on him to get things moving again.
The good news is that my customer was cooperative. The bad news is that his registrar had no way to resubmit the transfer request until the first one was cancelled and they had no way to cancel the existing one. The problem is that even though the status had been reset at GoDaddy's end, the status with the registry remained "pending transfer" and as long as that's the case no new transfer request can be submitted on this domain. It currently appears as though GoDaddy is unable to reset the status at the registry level and that the only way it will change is to wait for the pending transfer to lapse ( nobody can tell me how long that takes ). Meanwhile, my buyer is set to leave on a trip this Wednesday which means that if the transfer doesn't happen before he leaves, it won't happen until mid January! Of course, this means a few more weeks where he has the opportunity to change his mind.
So, the bottom line is that what you get with DTVS is that instead of losing money on stolen domains, you might lose money on sales whenever GD's DTVS system fails. Nice trade-off, huh? Does their DTVS system fail often? I have no idea. I just know that it failed for me 100% of the time that I used it. Needless to say, I'm not very happy with GD at the moment.