Hijacked Domain???

[eeedc]

I am considering purchasing a domain and am trying to make sure the seller has not hijacked it.

The problem is the seller is a Russian in Russia. I realize many speculators use fake names to avoid being accused of cybersquatting. Feels like I am buying a TV on a street corner.

The domain (a one word adjective with “est”) has never been used and has no links on Google or elsewhere (Archive.org).

The Whois was last updated in March, so hopefully if he hijacked it the original owner if not the seller has had time to notice it.

Is there any way to look at archives of Whois to make sure the owner has not changes.

How does one make sure the sellor has good title to a domain beyond checking Whois?

[DnPowerful]

Run the seller's name, and email addy through the newsgroup archives on Google if you haven't already.

Contact the registrar where it's registered to see if the domain is the subject of any dispute. They will know if it's been reported hijacked.

...And use escrow.com.

[eeedc]

Thanks for the reply.

I double checked and seller does not show up anywhere, which is partly making me nervous. It could be because he is Russian-with less Internet activity. It could be because like many domain speculators, he is using a different name to avoid being called a cybersquatter.

I plan to use escrow.com, but even escrow.com now advises people to make sure the sellor has clear title.

My worry is that if someone steal the password to a domain management account, they could steal a good domain.

Not to bad-mouth the Russians, but Russia is a center of hacking...

I would be satisfied to know that he was the original owner or the orginal owner droped the name. But to find this out, I guess I have to email the register or is there any way to find all the old Whois data - like in a land title search??

The registrar will most likely not tell you anything about the prior owner of the domain - or even confirm that their was a prior owner. You have no legal rights to this data.

There is no publicly available whois archive - though this data is available through the legal system should a court order be presented to the registry.

-t

[eeedc]

Thanks for the info.

Is all this talk about "locking" and watching your domains to prevent hijacking the result of a very few cases, such as the sex.com case, or something to be worried about?

In other words do people often hijack domains or is hijacking so rare that it makes the news when it happens (like stranger child abuduction).

[eeedc]

The domain name is Shortest.com, and sellor is asking $500.

Sellor seems to have a cgi script set up to take orders.

Maybe the sellor is in the business of taking expired domain names of people still in business and still trademarked and wishes to remain anoymous? But this one name, shortest.com, does not appear to have been used or tradmarked.

Can anyone tell from shortest.com if you recognize the sellor?

[DnPowerful]

It doesn't look good.

I'd be very careful with this fellow..

[dotsofdomains]

I know of one and only service that is archiving changes in ownership records of domain names, Thomson & Thomson, the number one trademark clearance search folks. They archive changes to domain name registrations (I can only imagine the size of this database) for use in a T&T "common law" domain name search.

So does Thomson & Thomson charge for searches of this information? Is it even available to the public?

How would they archive old whois data by the way? The biggest problem I see with this is I can change my whois data every day and there is no way anyone would know it changed unless they actually looked at the record. It's not like they are going to get a "change notice" from OpenSRS because my whois data has been updated.

-t

[GeorgeK]

They pay the $10,000/yr per registrar for bulk WHOIS access, so they can store the historical WHOIS. I think they get weekly updates on CD-ROM, but perhaps someone else knows better as to what exactly they get for their $10K.

[eeedc]

I checked out the Thomson-Thomson.com Website. Seems like you have to pay a small fee of 25 cents per record. I'll give it try later once I read all the fine print.

There are only 25 million domain names. At 1K bytes per record, thats only 25 Gigabytes. Since most Whois data doesnot change, I tooks like a single computer/server/database could handle the data.

But if registars are charging $10,000 for access, I can see why it's expensive.

Thomson & Thomson are on the list as having purchased the whois database from OpenSRS

Thomson & Thomson
Hostway
Valueweb
Accurl
eMarkmonitor
Netnames
Snapnames
Dun & Bradstreet

In reading through the Tucows sample whois bulk data agreement, it does allow them to download a new file every week.

http://www.opensrs.org/archives/disc...1.4-sample.pdf

Answers my question about accuracy - it's a weekly snapshot. I wonder if Thomson & Thomson keep each difference snapshot to snapshot.

I'm going to have to go buy some of my domain records and see how many changes they have tracked.

-t

[jimr]

Originally posted by eeedc
The domain name is Shortest.com, and sellor is asking $500.

Sellor seems to have a cgi script set up to take orders.

Maybe the sellor is in the business of taking expired domain names of people still in business and still trademarked and wishes to remain anoymous? But this one name, shortest.com, does not appear to have been used or tradmarked.

Can anyone tell from shortest.com if you recognize the sellor?

The whois says that the domain belongs to a company in St Petersburg. Yes, I agree that you should be very careful here. They might try to cheat you, they might also just want to make some dollars, as most Russians want. They might even read this forum...

I am married to a woman from St Petersburg and I visit St Petersburg from time to time. My wife doesn't want me to have any business with Russians... She doesn't trust them.

Russia is a very strange country. There are a lot of poor people and a lot of rich people and rich people are rich. They would not try to scam you for 500 bucks but you can easily get killed for 50 000... If this was something that was going on we would have heard of it, like we heard about Allfordomains. But I don't think Allfordomains operates from St Petersburg.

Get in contact with the seller. Call him and fax him. The phone number is not an ordinary phone line in St Petersburg. I believe it is a mobile phone. Get as much information as possible from the seller. Name, email address, street address, home phone number etc. Most probably you speak much better English so you have an advantage here.

Ask for a copy of the the company registration paper (say you need it for tax reasons...). If you fax it yo me I can ask my wife to have a look on it. I believe the company name is a fake, but on the other hand that is not any unnormal. People invent company names to look serious.

You can also ask to have a copy of the domestic and international passport of the seller. The domestic passport (id card) has information of the sellers address. Inform the seller that you will make shure that escrow.com only pays out money to the person with that passport. At least you then know who you are dealing with.

I believe that, if the seller is genuine, he would try to give you as much information as possible, cause 500 is a lot of money for ordinary people in Russia. If the seller doesn't want to send you anything, look for an other domain name.

Good luck

Jim
Stockholm

PS

Pse inform how everything goes. If it is all right I might need some assistant later on from your seller as I have a very good russian domain, neva.com (but in cyrillic). Neva is the river in St Petersburg and there are many many companies with names starting with neva

[eeedc]

On second thought, the person might not even be Russian.

Could be an American or anyone who registers domain name under multiple names to avoid being accused of cybersquatting, rightly or wrongly. If one is going to give a fake name, give one in a faraway country where it would be difficult to tell if fake or not.

In any case, if he/she does not respond to email, I'll move on.

[eeedc]

They wrote back after three days but declined to provide any information such as his/her name. A good example of how not to sell:

Hello,

All information about domain name owner can be found in WHOIS record
for domain. Domain is legitimate property of its current owner and is
free from any claims.

Regards,
Support Team
sales@mail.businessservice.com

[jimr]

Yes, that shows clearly that they are Russians. Typical Russian attitude. They don't understand how to deal with customers.

Remember, they might not be used to deal with people on the "outside" and they will never accept that Russia is different in any way... They just don't know how to behave and they don't understand that you must give and take in business.

They will probably not trust you either. Russians don't trust anyone, not even a bank. They normally have all money in cash (US Dollars) at home.

Businessservice Ltd is not in any way a Russian company name and you have all the rights in the world to find out who you are dealing with, especially as this big company only provide a mobile phone number and sign emails with a position and not a name.

You must also be sure that this "Support Team" has the authority to sell the domain name. Ask for a copy of the company registration paper.


If you want to go a head be *very* firm with them. Tell them all your demands from the beginning and that your terms are not negotaible.

Good Luck

[Whois-Search]

www.alexa.com try the contact info