“Over 1,000 high quality domains have been stolen by a thief in Iran. He has brazenly set up a website to sell the domains - LuxaryDomains.com. As well, he is sending out lots of emails to domainers informing them of the domains he has available. Here is a partial list of domains stolen:
Problems.com
Mistake.com
Enroll.com
Damaged.com
Statement.com
Evaluate.com
UnClear.com….”
This reminds me of two instances where we tried to help victims of domain theft and it turned out to be extremely lucrative for us. In both those instances we were able to pick up extremely high value domains from the rightful owners (one is solid seven figures in today’s market, the other is solid six figures US$) for pennies on the dollar. Not only you are helping to stop thieves who may target your own properties later, doing the right thing is simply a good Karma.
And for the domains above, preventive measures would have saved the owner this headache, situation. If those domain names were on Moniker or Fabulous on highest security settings this mess could have easily been avoided. While mainstream domain owners, those who own a couple of domains, do not know any better, you, the domain professional, should never doubt the importance of protecting your domain names. If this is not a wake-up call to all those who pay no attention to where their valuables are, I don’t know what is.
In comments area, Monte of Moniker adds:
"Sahar - we stopped this guy dead in his tracks trying to steal names in 2 accounts in Moniker when he spoofed email addresses. Very few registrars can prevent theft if the hijacker has email access…but with our new Maxlock, it is impossible for them to transfer or push names even if they have account access.
This guy hijacks hotmail, yahoo, msn, gmail email accounts then sends passwords and access to himself through lost password retreivals to get access.
he moved several names to Moniker that he stole from NSI, Enom, Register.com and Godaddy. We have worked with the security teams at each of those registrars to provide them all the documentation along with the thief’s picture id’s that he uses, ip’s he accesses, etc. We are helping our competitive registrar partners to be more secure and working together where ever we can on this issue to help domainers keep their domains safe and secure.
Thank you for posting this!"
Source: Posted on TheConceptualist by Sahar Sarid -- Reprinted with permission -- December 3, 2008
Sahar Sarid