Hijacked Domain Names - Please Help!

[Capt. Flash]

I have an associate whom registered some good names and used his email address from a web biz he owned as the admin contact. He sold the web biz but never changed his admin email address on the names he owned. The web biz name eventually dropped. Someone picked up the dropped name and created an email address exactly as the one for the admin contact for my associates names. They then went to my associate's registrar account and got the account password emailed to them, unlocked all the domains and transfered them to various registras and owners worldwide. Any chance for recovery? Any Ideas?

[Anthony Ng]

This is clearly theft. The chance of recovery and its level of difficulty would depend at least partly on the time frame, i.e. when did that (transfers of registrars and ownership) all happen? Nevertheless, the process is usually long and painstaking, and your determination of getting them back then depends on how "good" those names are.

And I guess you should have already looked into the domain which hosts the admin contact e-mail, and the contact is bogus, right? But regardless, the first point of contact should be respective registrars.

[Capt. Flash]

He contacted the FBI, they were not interested, he was told to "file a local police report".

Local police not interested because he only paid 10.00 for a name.

Attorney says costly to recover. 5 different countries involved. Privacy issues, etc. No real proof of value except for the register fee paid.

Current Registrars are well known and have good reputations. One Registrar claims no liability due to the associate listing the admin email and the associate bearing responsibility for upkeep.

In short a 10.00 domain name theft is not interesting enough for law enforcement, called a "Civil Matter".

Attorneys not interested unless it is sex.com or a domain name in current use producing a million dollars a year. However, for 10K up front they will take a look at it and see what they can do (Can't promises any results).

Registrars say sorry you listed the admin email not us.

I can not believe what I am hearing. Crazy. The names were good, maybe 10k for end user, but do not warrant all the up front costs that may never be recovered. 10k ++ to recover and then sell for 10k?

He came to me because of my past experience, and I actually encouraged him to buy some names years ago, but I am at a lost with this.

[Dave Zan]

One reason the sex.com case reached where it did is because Gary Kremen
had the money to spend for it.

As you realize, domain hijackings are not among the easiest things in the
world to solve, especially if registrars in other countries are involved. The main
problem lies in proving such a thing happened, even if it's obvious to the actual
owner.

Only legal assistance will give your associate any chance (if any, at all) of
making a dent. One possible option I can suggest is if your associate can ask
the registrar the domains were last registered with if he/she can avail of the
so-called transfer dispute policy .

Even that is doubtful. But I guess anything is better than nothing.

Good luck to your associate.

[namestrands]

I think that this sort of theft will not raise any alarm bells with local authorities. I would also assume that you are not highly financially out of pocket due to this theft.

The only method would be to file your own case against this person, and hope that a few lawyer letters would be enough for the current owner to put there hands up and return the domain.

[dtobias]

He was pretty stupid to lose the domains like that in the first place... it's kind of like saying "I had a great collection of classic cars, but I left them all parked out on the street, and forgot to take the keys, so they were all sitting there unlocked with the keys in them... and then somebody went and stole them, and I think they took them to another country or something. How do I get them back?"