Company recently realized that its valuable domain name was missing.
A lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Arizona alleges that the domain name Pay.io is stolen.
Deltaventure GmbH, a German company, filed the lawsuit (pdf) against the domain name and John Doe.
According to the suit, the plaintiff acquired the domain name in 2012 for €5,000. The domain name was transferred to a new owner (apparently in Russia) in 2016, but the plaintiff didn’t realize this until October of 2019.
Most in rem lawsuits are filed in Virginia, where the .com registry Verisign is located. However, .io is the country code domain name for British Indian Ocean Territory. The plaintiff filed the case in Arizona because Namecheap, the registrar where the domain is held, is organized in the state.
Pay.io is a valuable domain name that is worth much more than what the plaintiff paid for it in 2012. In the past year, Swipe.io sold for $68,000, Cook.io sold for $39,750 and Ease.io sold for $28,888.
Not realizing it was stolen for 3 years is pretty negligent, though obviously he should recover it. Should invest in some management of his inventory.
Apparently, the initial purchase was charged to his Amex Centurion card. That is a very expensive card. If I remember correctly, the card renewal fee is $ 5,000. a yr. ??? I’ll stick with my platinum for $ 650. a yr. 🙂
I looked it up.
Centurion card cost –
an initiation fee of $7,500 along with an annual fee of $2,500 . You’ll pay $2,500 for an additional cardholder. First yr, you pay $ 10k.
For Rick, Frank and Ron Jackson, that is a drop in the bucket.
Ron Jackson, does he have a power portfolio, or a lot of .us domains?
How can you not notice for three years if you have a domain name or not with your registrar?. Also the registrar sends confirmation emails not only for domain renewals but for transferring from one resgistrar to another, so what happened there?, was his email hacked? Even if his email got hacked how did the thief then get his login credentials surely there is two or three step verification which is sent to your cell phone? Something is a miss here……
If you own a lot of domains and there on auto renew you just expect them to be there. I don’t know about you but if you removed one domain from my Porfirio and asked me to tell you which one was missing it would be hard unless it was a 3 or 4 number/character domain.