Be careful when buying domain names that have been around the block.
A German company that bought ONU.com for $30,100 on NameJet in 2013 has filed a lawsuit (pdf) after it says the domain name was stolen.
SMP GmbH & Co KG is planning to build an Airbnb-type site on the domain name. It was alerted that the domain name was stolen after it received an email in May of this year asking if it wanted to buy the domain name for $29,000.
The company believes the domain name theft was perpetrated by someone in China.
It appears that an innocent domain buyer might now be holding the hot goods. ONU.com sold for $22,000 on Sedo in July.
It’s possible that the person who sold it on Sedo was also an unknowing owner of hot goods.
This is why I suggest that domain names that get around might we worth less.
Acro says
Premium domains that went to China, and changed hands a couple of times before being peddled to Westerners, are risky investments. Now you know why.
todd says
It sold on Namepros for a fire sale price.
https://www.namepros.com/threads/onu-com-priced-for-a-quick-sale.950633/
scrivener3 says
Maybe someone should invent title insurance for domain names. The company will do some due diligence and insure good title for a fee. Unfortunately domains are selling for so little ($30K for a three letter com) that I suspect there is not much money in it for anyone.
Using blockchain technology to record transfers might also solve the faithless seller problem.
Andrew Allemann says
I think Bill Hartzer has some sort of title insurance offering. But it’s probably not economical for a domain like this; he’d have to contact each of the previous owners before issuing it.
Larry says
Not really. It’s insurance. It’s possible to determine in most cases very easily and assess the risk of problems just by doing a whois search or whois history or a host of other things you can easily find. Only a small portion of cases involved potential fraud. So assuming enough transactions premiums cover that. It’s statistics. Same thing that happens when you buy homeowners they don’t do an inspection of your house to see how likely it will be that you have a fire.
Plus even asking questions doesn’t eliminate the risk either. Just like with title insurance for houses sometimes they have to pay out.
Andrew Allemann says
Another thing is I don’t think domainers will pay for this unless it’s really cheap
enom customer says
Another domain stolen out of an Enom acct.
Is there a backdoor in the enom platform?
Was the Enom acct compromised or was the owner’s email compromised?
Acro says
A lot of domains are stolen and their owners find out much later. Due to the popularity – and assorted rise in prices – of certain domain genres, such as LLL .com and LLLL .com domains, these change hands very frequently, often for a small profit at a time. A domain might end up changing ownership 3-4 times in a matter of weeks among Chinese buyers. The current ownership system is faulty, and ICANN better spend some of its cached millions to create a secure title system that ends this menace once and for all.
scrivener3 says
Since email accounts are often compromised registers should rely on a better method of authentication of transfers. Public/private key would be pretty secure. You could keep your private key on a USB drive and only mount it when you want to do a transaction.
Acro says
The problem isn’t the authentication itself. At some point, you need to authorize something. The login part uses two factor authentication, via an app, SMS, or fob. The problem is ownership transfer as a title. You can’t buy a home or a car without one.