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Valuable three-letter .Com domains stolen

by — Policy & Law 11 Comments

NNN.com, Wok.com among domains man claims were stolen.

A Japanese man alleges that valuable domain names were stolen from his registrar account and transferred to another registrar. These aren’t run-of-the-mill three-letter domains, either. Among the domains he says are stolen include nnn.com and wok.com.

Yoshiki Okada filed (pdf) the in rem action in U.S. Federal District Court in Virginia where the .com registry Verisign is located. Okada claims that eol.com, fde.com, jol.com, nnn.com, olp.com, tang.com, wok.com, wtv.com, and zhang.com were stolen from him.

It’s unlikely that the alleged thief will show up to represent himself in Virginia. In most cases, the judge in this type of lawsuit will accept a default judgment and order Verisign to transfer the domains. The exception is when a stolen domain has been re-sold, in which case the buyer might try to defend the domain name.

 

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Lawsuit filed to recover 6-digit domain names

by — Policy & Law 3 Comments

Complaint alleges that five domain names were stolen.

A person in China has filed a lawsuit in an effort to recover domain names they allege were stolen from their domain name registrar account.

Xiaomei Chen filed the in rem action against the domain names 789365.com, 402013.com, 402014.com, 402015.com, and vip999365.com. It also names Lin Bing Jun, but the plaintiff believes the Whois information is fake.

According to the complaint (pdf), the domain names have generated $6,000 in revenue and 325 visits on average each month. The domains were acquired in 2016.

The plaintiff believes the domains were stolen around October 7, 2017 and moved from their GoDaddy account. Most of the domains are still at GoDaddy and one is at NameSilo.

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Domainer files lawsuit claiming Roxi.com is stolen

by — Policy & Law 2 Comments

Lawsuit seeks to recover Roxi.com.

A domain name investor has filed a lawsuit (pdf) to try to recover Roxi.com, which was allegedly stolen.

John Lee of Precision Telephone Services, Inc. filed the lawsuit. The suit claims that he was the original registrant of the domain name in 1999. The domain name was subsequently hijacked from his account and transferred to another registrar after his email account was compromised.

It seems that Lee did not notice the theft immediately. DomainTools historical Whois records indicate that the ownership change occurred in the middle of 2015.

Lee filed suit in U.S. District Court in Virginia where .com registry Verisign is located. The suit claims that the registration violates the Anticybersquating Consumer Protection Act (ACPA).

Filing a lawsuit under ACPA in Virginia is a common tactic used to recover stolen domain names. The thief won’t show up and the court usually grants a default judgment ordering Verisign to transfer the domain name.

Stevan Lieberman is representing the plaintiff.

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Lawsuit filed to recover stolen $100,000 domain name

by — Policy & Law 1 Comment

Man says he paid $100,000 for three-letter domain name before it was stolen.

A California man has filed a lawsuit (pdf) to recover the valuable domain name BSH.com.

Qiang Du bought the domain name for $100,000 in April 2016. He transferred the domain name to Uniregistry after buying it. Perhaps through an email hack, the thief pushed the domain name to another account at Uniregistry and then transferred it to Chinese domain name registrar 22.cn. The whois record has a name and address in China, which Du alleges are false.

The in rem lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Virginia, where the .com registry Verisign is located. David E. Weslow of Wiley Rein is representing Du. He has represented a number of people who alleged domain theft.

What usually happens in these cases is the alleged thief doesn’t defend himself and the court orders the domain name transferred to the plaintiff.

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You need a plausible trademark to recover stolen domains through UDRP

by — Policy & Law 1 Comment

UDRP can be used to recover stolen domain names but you need to prove some sort of trademark rights in the domains.

The owner of 74 domain names who claims they were stolen from their GoDaddy account has failed to recover the domain names through a UDRP.

When you look at the list of domain names, it’s not surprising:

111xin2.com 222xin2.com 333xin2.com 444xin2.com 555xin2.com 666xin2.com 7-q.com 7422.com 777xin2.com 797979.com 888xin2.com 999xin2.com bx111222.com bx222333.com bx333444.com bx444555.com bx555666.com bx666777.com bx777888.com bx888999.com cheng11.com cheng111.com cheng222.com cheng33.com cheng333.com cheng444.com cheng55.com cheng555.com cheng666.com cheng77.com cheng777.com cheng88.com cheng99.com fa888.com h1898.com hg1669.com hg1895.com hg1896.com hg1898.com hg1898.net hggjw.com hggjw.net hhhggg.com hhhggg.net hhhggg.org long00000.com long11111.com long22222.com long33333.com long44444.com long55555.com long66666.com long77777.com long88888.com long99999.com my1898.com new2.com ok888999.com sjb1122.com sjb1133.com sjb1144.com sjb1155.com sjb6699.com xin2.com xin2.net yh111222.com yh1122.com yh1133.com yh1144.com yh1155.com yh1555.com yh1666.com yh6789.com yhgj.com

UDRP can be used to get back stolen domain names. But the complainant still must show some sort of trademark rights in the domain names that were stolen. Panelists tend to be lenient on this requirement in cases of stolen domains (especially when the current domain owner doesn’t respond), but you still need to provide some sort of proof for the rather generic domains at issue in this case.

In this case, panelist Linda Chang wrote:

The Panel has reviewed all of the annexes submitted by the Complainant, and has been unable to find any evidence that the key parts of the disputed domain names have been used/advertised as trademarks, i.e., to identify the Complainant as the source of goods or services under a particular mark. The Complainant only submits a conclusory allegation of common law rights without proving it has acquired trademark rights in these names to support its contention.

The Complainant provides no evidence beyond an assertion that very modest economic resources were spent on marketing the disputed domain names and they produce modest annual revenue. Furthermore, the mere assertion that the Complainants have spent economic resources in order to market the disputed domain names is insufficient by itself to establish rights in a mark for the purposes of the Policy

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