Suit alleges that domain name wasn’t owned by defendants named in class action.
Bitseller, a company in Cyprus, says that Verisign shouldn’t have transferred the domain name Radaris.com as requested by a court and is asking (pdf) for at least $500,000 in damages.
The backstory is interesting. In 2014, attorneys filed a class action lawsuit against organizations that is said were running Radaris.com. The lawsuit claimed that Radaris, which aggregates public information about individuals and businesses, was not complying with the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
In 2017 the court issued a default judgment against the defendants in that case and ordered Radaris.com to be transferred to the plaintiffs. The domain’s registrar, EuroDNS, refused to transfer the domain. So, according to the new lawsuit, the plaintiffs took their court order to Verisign and got the domain transferred.
Bitseller says that it operates the Radaris website and that the domain is registered by a company called Accuracy Consulting. Historical Whois information supports that Accuracy Consulting was the registrant of the domain.
Yet, despite neither Bitseller nor Accuracy being named in the original lawsuit, the domain was transferred. Bitseller and Accuracy got the court in the class action case to determine that the domain should be returned.
Bitseller eventually got the name back but argues that it suffered great losses from not having the domain name. It says that Verisign could have easily verified that Accuracy was not named in the lawsuit.
Verisign’s defense in this case will likely be that it was just complying with a court order as it always does. That court ordered stated:
To the extent that the registrars do not assist in changing the registrars of record for the domains under their control within 1 business day of receipt of this Order, the top-level domain (TLD) registrars [sic] (or their administrators) for the Subject Domain Names within 5 business days of receipt of this Order shall change or assist in changing the registrars of record for the Subject Domain Names to a registrar of Plaintiffs’ choosing.
Marc McCutcheon says
This is a frighteningly common (daily) occurrence. There are particular law firms (Stephen Gaffigan as an example) who know in which courts (Southern District Court of Florida as an example) they can raise lawsuits against hundreds of defendants and domain names, without any chance of the respondent being aware of the suit (as they are using WHOIS Privacy or are overseas) and know that they will get a default judgement from that court. This is how a lot of clothing brands wipeout sites in bulk who are peddling fake goods.
I am sure in the majority of circumstances the respondents are bad actors, but i highly doubt that there are adequate checks that the claimant is acting in good faith. If I had an evil streak I would hijack a domain just to prove the point. It is good to see someone putting the emphasis on Verisign to review as opposed to just act and hopefully they will do so in future cases. They will argue that they don’t hold the WHOIS data so can’t verify ownership though and therefore need to trust the courts.