question Enom transferred my domain even though I paid for it. Anything I can do to get it back?

[RadiantNova]

(I'm not a domain name trader, I just have (had?) one domain for my personal website.)

History:

• 2006: I registered the domain through SilentRegister.com (back when anonymity was a feature)
• 2006-2025: I regularly paid my renewal fees to continue using the domain. SilentRegister communicated with me clearly and proactively and I never had a problem with them, despite the old-school website.
• 2025-03-31: I paid to renew the domain for two years, expiring 2027-04-02 (and have PayPal receipt)
• 2025-04-02: The registration expired without my knowledge?
• 2025-04-28: I noticed my website was down and saw "Problem with registration" on SilentRegister. Emailed them and no response.
• 2025-05-01: Contacted them through another email address, no response. Checked WHOIS and it said "clientTransferProhibited", Registrar: ENOM, INC., Expiration: 2026-04-02 so I thought it was just a temporary issue (though it expired in one year, not the two I paid for)
• 2025-05-15: Contacted them again, but also learned about them being a reseller of Enom, who has an "Unresponsive Reseller" process, so I contacted them, too.
• 2025-05-17: Enom responded and basically said the domain is gone and they can't help me:

Your domain expired April 2, 2025 and has been through the grace period. It is now with GoDaddy Auctions. You can reach out to them to attempt to purchase the domain.

Thank you again for reaching out to Enom and have a wonderful day.

We apologize for the inconvenience. Unfortunately, we do not have access to the reseller's billing system, which prevents us from verifying the domain renewal. Our records indicate that the domain expired on 4/2/2025 and was subsequently moved to GoDaddy auctions after the grace period. Therefore, you will need to contact them directly if you wish to recover the domain.

Organization: Godaddy.com LLC
Phone: +1.18663519586
Email: auctions at godaddy.com


Thank you.
Enom Support

I've responded with paypal receipt, screenshots, etc. asked if they can communicate with SilentRegister, etc, and they haven't said anything else since the 17th.

So it's just gone?



Is there anything I can do to get my domain back?

 

[Hypersot]

Two years after the domain was gone from the reseller... not much you can do. Someone probably registered it, dropped it(?) and now it's been auctioned as an expired domain.

You can participate in the auction or just wait in case no-one wants it and drops (so you can get it cheap).

That's the problem with small resellers. You never know how they will manage their clients when they decide to quit the game.

 

[alcy]

this ahithole dont even have transfer expediate

juat bought little 4lcom
7 day wait

no wonder enom is unknown to most

best it remain so

or better still close down

 

[DigiNames]

That's tough. I would keep trying SilentRegister, eNom, and you might want to try reaching out to GoDaddy to let them know that you claim to be the rightful owner of the domain. I don't know that they will help you much, but perhaps you could convince them to put a hold on the auction or the domain from being transferred until it is straightened out.

If the domain is worth enough to you, you might try contacting a domain attorney like @jberryhill for advice and possibly assistance in trying to recover the domain. I don't know if he can help you, but if not perhaps he might be able to point you to someone that could.

Best of luck with it.

 

[Bannen]

There are 4 main companies in your domain's ownership pipeline, so let's do some clarification and investigating:

1 - SilentRegister - the reseller (they are not a licensed registrar) where you regged and renewed the domain
2 - Enom - the licensed registrar that is the parent company of SilentRegister
3 - Godaddy - in partnership with Enom; when your domain expired, by default Enom sent it to Godaddy's expired domain auction
4 - HugeDomains - who won the domain at auction, and now have it for sale (OP messaged me this info)

First you need to find where the problem/fault is:

1 - SilentRegister - this is where the 'front line' problem is. The problem with resellers is: practically anyone can become a reseller. In the best cases, reseller accounts may be run by very efficient, honest, energetic people and teams; a great example is Namecheap, which used to be a reseller of Enom also, but they did things so well and became so huge that eventually they applied for their own registrar status and then gave up their reseller status. A poor example would be some kid living in his parents' basement, with no care of the reseller business he started, no care about providing good tech support, just going through the motions in hopes his reseller site will make him some cash.

I don't know where SilentRegister falls between those two poles, but since you said they've been good to you for 19 years and suddenly aren't working properly or responding... sounds like something has perhaps happened to the owner/s. Maybe got too sick to look after the site, maybe died, maybe needed cash and decided to cheat their customers by taking reg/renewal fees but not actually putting the regs/renewals through... I don't know.

But since you made the payment, and I'm assuming you did that correctly and the same as you always did, since your domain has been there for 19 years... then since you paid but your payment did not initiate the domain's renewal... yes, something is seriously gone wrong with SilentRegister.

2 - Enom - this is where you need to find accountability. I do not know the agreement that is made between resellers and their parent company, but there must be accountability in the contract. Because if any Joe Schmoe can create a reseller account, there has to be a process in place where the reseller cannot cheat their customers. You know, take cash, refuse to deliver the services paid for, and then the parent company (Enom) says, "Oops, sorry that's just a reseller, we have no control over them. They can take your money and screw you and there's nothing we can do about it, because we don't have access to see their payment and service records."

So when Enom told you they have no way of checking on their resellers to see if their resellers are cheating you... something is wrong with the accountability there. That's where you need to focus your efforts. I would recommend opening a complaint with ICANN, who overseels registrars. Once you describe the issue, ICANN will know where and how it applies to the parent/reseller agreement between Enom and SilentRegister.

Since SilentRegister is no longer responding, I would also suggest you focus on urging Enom to insist on having direct contact with the owner of SilentRegister, to make sure the owner of that reseller account is actually alive and responding to them.

I can see where Enom can and would want to 'pass the buck' and tell you they cannot check to see whether your payment was made to their reseller SilentRegister; but I'm sure that ICANN rules must state that Enom must have a way to check whether their reseller is still alive and responding and running the reseller site. Again, I'd suggest you strongly focus your energy toward getting Enom to verify this.

If they verify that the owner of SilentRegister is still alive and operating the site... then that would be your next step: finding out how to get the owner to respond to you, and have them investigate why your payment was made but your domain wasn't renewed.

3 - Godaddy expired auctions - they are not at fault here. The fault was at SilentRegister/Enom, and when the domain failed to renew, it was sent by default to Enom's partner, Godaddy, to auction off. Godaddy had nothing to do with your domain's failure to renew. They are protected by their TOS, and would never be able to 'claw back' the domain for you. So there's no point I can see to contacting them about this. They are just the marketplace.

4 - Same with HugeDomains, the new owners. They buy dozens or hundreds of domains every day, and own millions. They bought the domain legitimately, just as I legitimately bought every domain I also won via Godaddy expired auctions.

You've PM'd me the name, and I looked it up, and found the price HugeDomains paid for it. It was a pretty small amount. Even though HD are not in any way at fault here, you might contact them and explain the situation, say you are investigating into why the domain was not renewed when you paid for it (and send them proof of that payment). Maybe offer them their purchase price of the domain, plus a little profit.

It is unlikely they will help you. They own so many domains, and purchase so many expired domains, that they must hear this story constantly, even if it is true. They may give you a discount from their current BIN price, but even the discounted price will probably still be $thousands. I would not count on them being sympathetic and helping you... but hey, cross your t's and dot your i's, just to say you tried.

I don't think you will get your domain back. Still worth trying those few tactics:

1 - email Enom again and urge them to make sure their reseller SilentRegister owner is still alive and responding to them. If the owner responds to Enom... ask Enom to investigate this on your behalf, and tell them the reseller is not responding to YOU.

2 - email HugeDomains and explain the issue. They likely won't help you out, but like I said, at least try so you can say you tried every avenue.

3 - open the complaint with ICANN, and ask them how the accountability between Enom and SilentRegister is forced. You know, how to check that a reseller isn't just taking payments but not delivering the goods.

Enom, to me, is key here; they are the parent registrar, and they are licensed by ICANN. They need to step up to the plate and really find out whether their reseller is cheating you, whether on purpose or by accident (eg: if the reseller owner has died, etc). Enom needs to be accountable for the reseller accounts they hand out.

Good luck!

 

[jberryhill]

Enom, to me, is key here

First off, ICANN has utterly zero engagement with how registrars and resellers transact business. The requirements which ICANN imposes on registrars relative to resellers is merely to ensure that policies such as the UDRP are enforceable. Neither Enom nor ICANN is going to get into a payment dispute between the OP and the party with whom the OP decided to do business.

But, more importantly, look at the service provided by SilentRegister.com. From their website:

"With an anonymous registration we mask your private information and replace it with ours in the public whois database. We maintain a separate and private database that contains the real owners of every domain registered through our service."

Bottom line - the OP was never the registrant of the domain name in the first place, and Enom certainly has no record the OP was ever the registrant of the domain name. The OP signed up for a service which is deliberately structured to separate the OP's identity from the domain name. That's all well and good, but when you do that sort of thing, you are NEVER going to get the domain name "back" if it is stolen, lost, non-renewed, or whatever, because you never were the registrant of the domain name in the first place as far as Enom or anyone else is concerned.

The way this reseller advertises its services, it would be like, "Okay, you want to buy a car, but you don't want to be registered as the owner. So, give me the money, I'll buy the car, and I'll be listed as the owner." When that car is stolen, you aren't getting it back. You were never the owner. You can't go down to the police station and say, "I'd like to report a car owned by someone else was stolen and I want it back."

I see people do stuff like this all of the time, and I just can't figure out the thinking - "Oh, I used a fake name because I wanted privacy" - and then they get into some kind of problem and they think they have rights in the domain name. I've been at this for more than two decades, and I'll never understand the thought process involved in that.

Walk up to a front desk at a hotel and say, "I need a key to room 508."

"Can you show us your ID?"

"Well, yes, but the room isn't under my name. I had someone else book the room in their name for me, but I lost the key."

You aren't getting into that room. It's not registered to you. It was never yours in the first place. The only people who knew you ever had anything to do with the domain name, "maintain a separate and private database that contains the real owners of every domain registered through our service" and to which nobody else in the world has access.

 

[cooljub]

2 - Enom - the licensed registrar that is the parent company of SilentRegister

Maybe their wholesaler rather than parent company but I get what you mean

 

[Bannen]

Thanks for diving deeper, @jberryhill

And therein lies the accountability in that exact statement:

"With an anonymous registration we mask your private information and replace it with ours in the public whois database. We maintain a separate and private database that contains the real owners of every domain registered through our service."

The terminology is misleading, whether intentional or not. To say they 'mask your private information' but 'replace it with ours in the public whois database' are contradictory statements. 'Masking' and 'replacing' are two different things. One is 'covering up or making appear to be different/private', the other is 'replacing the original with something else'. Not masking/covering it up... REPLACING IT.

And highly illegal, in domain registration terms. To consider what's happening, look at this if it were in a larger scale: say Godaddy did this. Literally tens of millions of domains' owner would suddenly find out that, given any dispute, they don't actually own their domains. They have only been paying for the renewal. To learn that Godaddy, instead of 'masking' the whois details for each domain, just put in their own (Godaddy's) ownership info to each one. And simply stored the 'real owner' details for each domain, in some 'file' elsewhere.

The terminology used by SilentRegister is murky, to the point of being very misleading. It's confusing even to a native English speaker - especially if you're a non-lawyer - and to any non-English speaker, it would be downright impossible to understand the true meaning beneath what SilentRegister is saying in that above quoted statement. On face value, they are talking about 'masking' whois; that is misleading, because what they're actually doing is 'replacing' whois info.

And no matter what they say on their site or in their TOS, this isn't the Wild West; a reseller cannot legally 'become the owner' of domains you register there, without your express permission for them to do so. That murky statement of 'masking' and 'replacing' can not, to any sane person, be construed as 'I hereby give over the ownership of my domain to SilentRegister'.

I do not know where the accountability is. But I would definitely register a complaint with ICANN, quoting the above statement from SilentRegister's site, and say that you did not agree to actually giving ownership and control of your domain over to SilentRegister when you regged it, and that their terminology misled you into thinking your whois was being MASKED so it would 'appear' to be theirs, not REPLACED so it was ACTUALLY theirs.

Domain ownership is very strict, in the eyes of ICANN. The above message on SilentRegister's site is very murky and misleading; and their action of changing your domain's ownership to their ownership, without making abundantly clear that is what they are doing... there is your accountibility.

Even though I think your domain is long gone and you'll have little to no chance of getting it back, unless the new owner feels very forgiving and generous about your plight... it is worth opening the complaint with ICANN if only to get them to look into SilentRegister's actions, and get them shut down. If they did this to you, they have done this to every customer of theirs. None of their customers actually owns their own domains;

And if SilentRegister is suddenly not responding - maybe the owner has died or become sick - then there will be a lot of domain owners who are now going to lose their domains, just like you did. If SilentRegister's owner has your 'domain owner info' in a file somewhere... who knows, like on a stack of paper, in a folder, gathering dust, in a box sitting beside their laundry detergent... well, if SilentRegister's owner has died or whatever, all those domain owner files are now garbage.

This really, really needs looking into. Very scary. And Enom, as the parent (or wholesaler, as pointed above) needs to look into how resellers are using their services and maybe committing theft/fraud, by changing ownership of all these domains.

 

[Future Sensors]

Domain ownership is very strict, in the eyes of ICANN.

Nonetheless, ICANN has revised its policy on this matter to better align with evolving data protection standards.

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/domain-name-registration-data-2023-11-02-en

Under ICANN contracts, RDDS can be used for legal purposes except for enabling mass unsolicited commercial advertising or solicitations. Additionally, it cannot be used for enabling high-volume, automated electronic processes that send queries or data to a registry or registrar's systems except as necessary to manage domain names.

The recent evolution of data protection regulations across the globe changed the landscape and impacted the availability of personal data through RDDS. Specifically, the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has brought about changes in ICANN agreements and related WHOIS policies. Read more about how the ICANN community and organization has responded to the GDPR here.

One of the key outcomes of the policy changes was the restriction of access to most personal data. However, ICANN contracted parties (registries and registrars) are required to provide reasonable access to registration data that was previously publicly available. The community is working towards addressing the need for access to previously public registration data while aiming to strike a balance between data privacy and accessibility.

 

[jberryhill]

And no matter what they say on their site or in their TOS, this isn't the Wild West; a reseller cannot legally 'become the owner' of domains you register there, without your express permission for them to do so.

I haven’t read the rest of their terms, but ultimately Enom would have no way of knowing. A lot of folks become resellers for preferred pricing on their own domains, so it’s not as if it would look unusual from their end that all of a reseller’s names are registered to that reseller.

So if it was anonymity the OP wanted, I’d say the current circumstances indicate that objective to have been a rousing success - the OP’s identity is so far removed from this domain that there is no way to show it was ever theirs.

 

[RadiantNova]

Two years after the domain was gone from the reseller... not much you can do.

It expired in April 2025. I got no notice from SilentRegister or eNom that it was expiring. I had sent an (early) payment in 2023 and another in 2025 to renew it for 2 years each, so I had actually paid for the domain through April 2028, and had no idea they had taken the money and only renewed it for 1 year instead of 4.

You can participate in the auction

I'm not spending $11k on it, lol. It was just a personal website that a company had offered a few hundred to buy, but I said no and waited for a better offer, which never came.

Its only other value to me is that I had my personal website there for 2 decades. But whatever; I can get a .io domain or something nowadays and move it over.

That's tough. I would keep trying SilentRegister, eNom, and you might want to try reaching out to GoDaddy to let them know that you claim to be the rightful owner of the domain.

I've done all of those. SilentRegister hasn't responded to anything and might be dead. Enom/Tucows says it's gone and there's nothing they can do. GoDaddy already resold it and can't help.

Enom's responses:

I can reach out to them on your behalf in the hopes they respond to you, but the domain is no longer available with Enom or with Silent Register. If GoDaddy has sold the domain, we have no recourse to get it back.

Enom provides a platform that resellers use to sell domains, and they are responsible for renewals and other support.

The domain is no longer with us. The domain was not renewed during the grace period and was picked up by GoDaddy. It is the previous reseller's responsibility to renew the domain for you. Enom is not responsible for their actions if they did not do that. We also do not interfere if such a thing did occur. I'm sorry.

So even after doing the "Unresponsive Reseller" process with Tucows/Enom, they never attempted to contact the reseller, and claim it's not their problem, despite saying "As a registrar, we carry the responsibility of making sure registrants are supported when resellers are unresponsive" in their documentation.


ICANN did respond and wants more details:

With regard to domain name renewal obligations, the Expired Registration Recovery Policy (ERRP) requires, among other things, that a registrar notifies the Registered Name Holder (also known as “registrant”) three times of the domain name expiration: approximately one month before, approximately one week before and within five (5) days after the domain name expired (if not renewed or deleted). According to your complaint, you did not receive these expiration reminder notices. You also indicated that you tried to renew or restore the domain name without success.

I never got any of these reminders, from SilentRegister or eNom, even when SilentRegister was working normally, and I had complained that there were no reminders. I sent those complaint emails to ICANN, too. So maybe someone will get in trouble, at least.

And maybe I can try to get a refund on my PayPal registration fees from 2023 and 2025? I'm not expecting much else, though.

Thank you all for your help! Sorry I missed the reply notification.