Dotster Weirdness

[discobull]

I'm in the process of selling a domain registered with dotster ( I bought it as a pre-release domain through snapnames and dotster happened to be the registrar of record ). In any case the buyer made his payment to escrow.com and asked how to go about transferring it to GoDaddy. I suggested that he open a dotster account and that I push the domain to him instead as that would save us 5 days of waiting.

Here's the kicker. Today the buyer contacts me and informs me that the transfer is progressing smoothly. That he opened a Dotster account, transferred my domain into it and was in the process of transferring it to GoDaddy. I laughed to myself at his naivete because he couldn't possibly have done that without my participation, right?? Wrong!! I logged into my account and the domain was gone. I looked up the whois record and sure enough it had his name as the contact. How is this possible???

I tried contacting dotster to ask about it and they told me they'd get back to me in 24 to 48 hours. I've never experienced anything like this! Thankfully, the money is in escrow, but what if it hadn't been?

 

[forge]

Woah. How on earth could this have occurred?

Of course it is Dotster after all. I do recall things like at MyDomain, where a domain I had transferred out later still appearing in MyDomain control panel. Just bad.

 

[discobull]

Woah. How on earth could this have occurred?

Of course it is Dotster after all. I do recall things like at MyDomain, where a domain I had transferred out later still appearing in MyDomain control panel. Just bad.

The issue with domains not being removed from accounts after they've been transferred out seems to be common with Enom and Tucows resellers. That kind of thing is annoying, but allowing one person to take possession of another person's domain is in another league of scary!

 

[AEProgram]

can you please update us on what happened here, how did he get access to your domain?

 

[discobull]

can you please update us on what happened here, how did he get access to your domain?

I'm going to be posting an update early in the coming week.

 

[discobull]

The explanation for what happened was something I never imagined:

My client set up a new Dotster account as per my instructions, but, as he didn't know how to proceed beyond there, he emailed Dotster for further instructions. So... THEY JUST GAVE HIM MY DOMAIN! Yup, a random guy with whom they had no prior relationship received my domain without my authorization and without me receiving so much as notification from Dotster, by simply asking for it! This was a $2,200.00 sale so potentially, if he had contacted them before paying escrow.com, I might be a couple of grand poorer as a result of how Dotster handled this. I guess I got lucky?

I've lost count of how many registrars I've used over the last few years, but I have never come across this sort of ineptitude before. I didn't want to post the details of what had happened until I'd given them a chance to respond, but they've basically had nothing to say to make this seem any less outrageous. When I first asked them for an explanation, they told me they would get back to me in 24-48 hours. The next day, I received another email from them telling me they would need an additional 72 hours. Finally, they wrote me back to say that they were sorry, and that they would deal with the problem internally to make sure this never happened again. That's it. There was nothing in terms of an explanation for how this could happen. All I know is that if snapnames ever sends one of my domains to Dotster again, I'm going to dump them as quickly as I possibly can and probably stress out until the transfer completes.

 

[forge]

Don't wish to open a new thread, but I'm truly aghast that two of my domains registered with MyDomain (Dotster) are shown as "not manageable at this registrar" for some unknown reason. Dotster's so-called "Domain Central" interface is utter crap. I transferred the two domains to their registrar 7 months ago, and this new headache just is inexcusable. Anyone else have similar experiences with them? Also, I recall that the last time I transferred my domains OUT from MyDomain, those same domains persisted to appear in their control panel, as if they were still at their registrar, many months later. Stupid broken interface!