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What domains BMW and other end users bought last week

by — Domain Sales 0 Comments

BMW, a gaming company, and a deals site bought domain names over the past week.

It was a frustrating week to uncover end user domain name sales at Sedo because many of the buyers are using Whois privacy. Still, I was able to figure out the (likely) buyer of WomenInc.com at $25,000 after sleuthing around.

Also note the €11,000 sale of Iliad.it and BitCasinos.com, which will be used to direct people to casinos that accept bitcoin.

Here’s the list I uncovered:

(You can view previous lists like this here.)

WomenInc.com $25,000- The domain has Whois privacy but the buyer is likely this group. You’ll note that they also have a trademark filing for The Music Channel and are using that template for the new site.

Iliad.it €11,000 – Iliad Holding S.p.A. Looks like a relatively new company. The site on the domain as of 9/19 is from the previous owner.

ActionGame.com €6,500 – Online gaming network and publisher Zygomatic.

Scortex.com $5,000 – Scoretex is a “smart visual imaging” company. They were smart to upgrade from the matching .io domain.

BitCasinos.com $4,600 – The buyer is using Whois privacy but is creating a site about casinos that accept bitcoin.

Alpharent.com $3,500 – BMW. BMW owns a company called Alphabet as well as Alphabet.com, which is why Google couldn’t get that domain when they named their new parent company.

Waug.com $3,495 – Waug Travel in South Korea uses the domain name Waug.co.kr.

Pepper.es €3,300 – Pepper.com is an online deals site with over a half billion pageviews per month.

LiveLife.net $2,868 – CSC bought this domain for one of its clients.

PrivateDetective.net $2,299 – Private investigation company International Counterintelligence Services (ICS).

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Man sentenced for hijacking company’s domain name and demanding $10,000

by — Policy & Law 5 Comments

Man held former company’s name for ransom and redirected it to porn site.

An Arizona man has been sentenced for redirecting his former company’s domain name to a porn site.

Travis Tso worked for an IT company in Phoenix. In 2011 he renewed an account for the company with GoDaddy.

Fast forward to 2015, when the company decided to update its contact information with GoDaddy. The company reached out to Tso and asked for the account login info. According to the statement Tso made in a plea deal, Tso lied and told them he didn’t have it.

He then changed the contact info on the account several times and made changes to the account so the website was redirected and email didn’t work. He asked the company for $10,000 if they wanted the domain back. When they refused, he redirected the domain to a porn site.

Tso was sentenced Monday to four years of probation and will pay $9,000 restitution.

While someone at a company has to have registrar login credentials, it’s important to have security protocols in place to make sure this type of hijacking doesn’t happen. Also, the domain shouldn’t be registered in the name of an employee.

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Spanish police raid .Cat domain name registry offices

by — Policy & Law 7 Comments

Raid is part of crackdown on Catalonia independence referendum.

As reported on DomainIncite and InternetNews.me overnight U.S. time, Spanish police have raided the offices of Fundació puntCAT, the registry operator for the .cat domain name.

.Cat is a domain name for the Catalonia region and people that speak Catalan.

Spanish authorities asked the registry to block domain names that were being used to spread information about an upcoming referendum for independence. puntCAT sent this letter to ICANN earlier this week to advise it about what was happening:

Spanish authorities have raided the office and apparently taken some computers. According to InternetNews.me, they also arrested the group’s CTO. It’s unclear what arrested means in these circumstances.

There are over 100,000 .cat domain names registered. The ongoing operations should not be affected because puntCAT uses a third-party registry services provider, and because of the distributed nature of DNS. However, if certain domains are deleted or blocked, this could propagate across DNS.

It’s worth noting that .cat is not a country code domain name. It is a sponsored top level domain name.

Here are some pictures from the raid: Click to continue reading…

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Median sales price at Uniregistry stays steady as sales grow

by — Domain Sales 4 Comments

Median price has dropped slightly so far this year.

Uniregistry issued a release this morning with sales data from the first eight months of 2017.

The total number of sales increased 24% to 3,617. The total value was $29 million (up from $25 million), or an average of $8,017 per domain.

The release noted that the average sales price was down from $9,110 last year.

But averages are misleading. I generally ignore them when marketplaces release them. They can be drastically affected by one or two big sales and don’t paint an accurate picture of what’s going on.

The median–the point at which half the sales are above and half are below–is a better measure for a marketplace. I reached out to Uniregistry to get this number.

The median price this year has been $4,000. Last year it was $4,200, so there was little movement on that front.

This median number is a good one for domain sellers to think about.

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Lack of disclosure leads to Reverse Domain Name Hijacking finding

by — Policy & Law 0 Comments

Mexican resort operator failed to disclose business relationship with domain owner.

Trouble in Paradise.

The operators of two Mexican resorts–Golden Parnassus Paradise of the Gods and Great Parnassus Paradise of the Gods–have been found to have engaged in reverse domain name hijacking (RDNH) in a recent cybersquatting complaint.

The resorts filed UDRPs against the domains GoldenParnassusCancun.com and GreatParnassusCancun.com. The domains are owned by a company in Florida that wholesales vacation packages to travel agencies.

The UDRP filings missed several critical details and failed to disclose a 10+ year relationship between the complainants and the domain owner. It turns out that the Florida company has a long-running business deal to wholesale vacation packages to the resorts. It has even received the resort owner’s approval for changes to websites on the domains at issue.

Although the domain owner didn’t ask for a finding of RDNH, the panel considered it anyway and determined that the filing was made in bad faith:

After reviewing all the evidence, the Panel has come to the conclusion that the Complainant has failed to disclose a number of material facts, including the existence of the long standing business relationship between the parties and the specific facts recited in this decision at paragraph 6.B, which were critical to the Panel’s finding that Respondent holds legitimate rights and interests in the disputed domain names, and which were obviously known to the Complainants before they began these proceedings. In these circumstances, the filing of the Complaint represents an abuse of process which the Panel finds entirely unacceptable. Accordingly, the Panel finds that the Complainants have engaged in reverse domain name hijacking.

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