Man sues eNom after domain (not in his name) is transferred to someone else.
One of the costs of doing business as a domain registrar is the inevitable lawsuits. Most of these are trademark suits where the plaintiff includes the registrar of a domain name as an defendant. But some of them are more interesting, such as a suit against eNom for allegedly failing to implement appropriate domain transfer safeguards.
Plaintiff William Georgevich claims he bought the domain name Detox.org from Janet Bridgers. After acquiring the domain, a person identified only as “Godfrey” in the lawsuit contacted the whois contacts for Detox.org and offered to buy it for $1,500. (As it turns out, Godfrey is Justin Godfrey, who owns EscrowDNS). One of those solicitation emails was sent to the whois technical contact, who forwarded the request to Bridgers, thinking she still owned the domain. Bridgers agreed to sell the domain to Godfrey for $1,500 and transferred the domain name.
Clearly, Bridgers still had access to the account in order to transfer the domain name. And, if the description in Georgevich’s lawsuit is valid, Bridgers agreed to sell the domain name to Godfrey that she already sold to Georgevich. But Georgevich isn’t suing Bridgers. Instead, he’s suing eNom claiming that Bulk Register, which it owns, failed to take adequate safe guards to prevent this sort of transfer.
(He also filed a separate suit against Godfrey, which was voluntarily dismissed on July 10. In a statement to Domain Name Wire, Godfrey wrote “Our company does not comment on frivolous lawsuits. Our justice system allows for anyone to file a lawsuit against anyone without justification. If the Plaintiff thought the suit was worth pursuing we would’ve file a response.”)
Here are some of Georgevich’s allegations in his case against eNom, and my take:
CLAIM: Bulk register did not send an email to either Bridgers or Georgevich confirming the transfer, “as is the industry standard”.
ANALYSIS: It is industry standard to send an alert to the domain owner informing them of a transfer. However, historical whois records indicate the domain was never put in Georgevich’s name, so there’s no way Bulk Register could have contacted him. The only e-mail addresses in the whois were Bridgers’ and the technical contact’s.
CLAIM: Godfrey (the buyer) used a weakness in Bulk Register’s account interface to bypass the formal process of transferring domain names from one account to another, which typically take 24-48 hours and require email confirmations from the owner prior to occurring.
ANALYSIS: I’ve never heard of a registrar taking 24-48 hours for a transfer between accounts. It’s usually instantaneous. As far as requiring email confirmation, that depends on the registrar. Presumably the person who accesses the account has authority to transfer the domain. If not, then the domain owner shouldn’t have provided access to them.
CLAIM: Because Bulk Register hadn’t implemented safeguards, the domain was instantly transferred without Georgevich being able to approve/decline the transfer.
ANALYSIS: I’m not convinced the domain was ever in Georgevich’s account to begin with. His name never shows up in whois, and Bridgers had access to the account.
CLAIM: An administrative freeze to block the domain from transfer to another registrar failed to prevent Godfrey from moving the domain to another registrar, change whois, and change nameservers.
ANALYSIS: I don’t quite get this. It appears to be at eNom right now, which owns Bulk Register. But the whois and nameservers could be changed.
CLAIM: Georgevich secured a valuation of the domain name at $250,000.
ANALYSIS: Cough. Cough.
Georgevich is suing to get the name back and damages of over $75,000.
Lawsuit file (pdf)
David J Castello says
Andrew, please tell us who “evaluated” Detox.org for 250K.
Andrew Allemann says
David – it doesn’t say 🙂
Cartoonz says
He won’t get any further suing eNom than he did going after Godfrey…
The 64 thousand dollar question still is:
Why is he not suing the web designer that actually sold the name to Godfrey (supposedly after she’d sold it to him)? She is the only one that could have perpetrated any misdeeds, if there were actually any misdeeds done.
Bridgers controlled the name. Bridgers willfully did everything to ensure the completion of the transaction to Godfrey.
But, instead, she is never named in either of these ridiculous suits.
Tia Wood says
This is absolutely 100% ridiculous. However, I have to say Justin’s quote up there is a classy response. 🙂
George Kirikos says
I think the valuation might be based on it being an active developed website (it does rank #1 for “detox” in Google), and not just for it being a domain name. Without knowing the actual earnings from the site, it’s hard to guess what kind of multiplier they might be using.
It’ll be interesting to see how eNom now responds, whether they defend it or whether they compel transfer of the domain name back to the original owner (in which case presumably Godfrey would go after eNom for damages).
This is why folks should be in favour of stronger overall registry/registrar security, to avoid these kinds of messes. VeriSign submitted a recent set of proposals:
http://forum.icann.org/lists/bc-gnso/msg00202.html
which ICANN just rubberstamped, so we might get superior security, albeit with monopoly pricing. ICANN should instead regulate the price, or put it out to tender, as one doesn’t want VeriSign gouging consumers with yet another monopoly service.
jorge says
75-G’s is a lot of damages for a domain. I assume the alleged “original” sales price was less than the $1500 that Bridgers actually got?
Did Bridgers actually accept money from Georgevich?
Anyone out there use a sales contract when selling domains?
Dennis says
I do not think that Georgevich would have any chance of winning against Enom. The transfer system is fully automated and when the transfer take place, Enom was not even aware nor are they in any position to prevent. IT all lays in the domain registrant that has access to the Domain. Georgevich should sue Janet Bridgers.
enoss says
be careful of “stronger overall registry/registrar security”. it is most often used to rationalize transfer restrictions.
George Kirikos says
That’s true, enoss. But, for sophisticated domain registrants with valuable domains (a minority of the entire population of registrants), that isn’t as pressing (they tend to keep all their domains at a single trusted registrar, like Tucows in my case). The greater fear is that someone does some kind of hack attack at the registrar, or hacks a registrant’s admin email account, or uses some form of social engineering to wreak havoc on a domain. If one raises the bar substantially, so that there’s out-of-band communication required to make certain important changes (e.g. change of registrant, change of registrar or change of nameservers) for the “important” domains, the hackers will probably move on to someone else who’s an easier target.
Hopefully the registrars and the public will push back against the new monopoly pricing powers that VeriSign gets with these new services (there should still be time to affect the outcome, as changes to dot-com must be approved by the Department of Commerce).
Domain Investor says
Enom is very sloppy about updating whois.
But, the responsibility falls back onto the domain owner to keep their whois up to date.
I’m sure Enom’s TOS will release them from any legal exposure.
The 2nd owner made a mistake by not properly updating his whois.
I speculate the first owner thought she would get away with re-selling it.
Godfrey bought detox.org too cheap.
I guess the first owner didn’t care.
Godfrey got lucky.
Godfrey’s profit could have been eaten up by a long, drawn out lawsuit.
Is the original owner located in the U.S.?
That might be why she is not being sued.
The only people who will make out on this lawsuit with be the lawyers.
Vikz says
Any idea how much William Georgevich claims he paid Janet Bridgers for the domain before she resold it?
Andrew Allemann says
@ Vikz – nope, the agreement signed between Bridgers and Georgevich is a simple one paragraph agreement. It just has Bridgers assigning ownership to Geogevich. It’s not a contract, as it doesn’t include any sort of consideration in it.
vCamera says
it’s 2w
hi greeting good afternoon ,
we have some very-serious issues with eNom ,
could any1 tell us
the email’s-address or
the phone’s-# of top-managements of eNom ??
??
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cheers thank ye