InDomaining

If you’re a domain investor, it’s likely that you’ve either been offered a stolen domain name or seen one advertised for sale, whether you knew it was stolen or not. Buying a stolen domain name can cost the buyer quite a bit of money (once the name is recovered) and it could hurt his reputation if he sells it.

In my opinion, it’s the buyer’s responsibility if he buys a stolen domain name, and all buyers should perform due diligence on a domain name before making the acquisition or risk losing his investment and domain name. Just like with physical property, if a purchase is found to be stolen, the person in possession of it will probably lose it and will likely not see his funds returned (I am sure there are cases where this isn’t true – especially when something is bought in good faith, but it’s an assumption).

There are a lot of seemingly obvious clues that can be seen when a stolen domain name is offered, including ridiculously low price, top domain name offered by a new member of a forum without any previous feedback, or someone emailing you in private with a too good to be true offer. While not all of these necessarily mean a domain name is stolen, they are clues that a buyer should note and should set off red flags.

A buyer should use the Whois History tool offered by DomainTools to see if there are any suspicious changes in the Whois data. For example, if a Whois record seems to remain the same for 10 years and the most recent change notes a simple email address update while the rest of the record is the same, that is a big red flag.

A couple of years ago, I was emailed by someone offering a pretty good domain name at a great price that looked to be owned by a lady in New York, although the contact email had recently changed. I was able to get in touch with the lady shortly after domain investor Richard Lau had already done the same, and she was able to recover her domain name by contacting the registrar. Had I not done due diligence, I could have bought this name, which surely would have been taken from my account and given back to the rightful owner once they determined that it had been pilfered from her account.

Due diligence is especially critical when you are purchasing intangible property like domain names.

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1. Importance of Due Diligence When Buying a Domain Name When you have secured a deal to purchase a domain...
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Richard Kirkendall and Richard Lau photographed by Kamila Sekiewicz at DOMAINfest 2010

As DNN has learned the buyers of the DomainName.com registrar and customer base sold by DomainConsultant, are non other than Richard Lau of DomainManager.com and Richard Kirkendall of NameCheap.com. The two, also known as “The Richards” partnered up on the purchase and are planning to transform the company into a new brand.

Richard Kirkendall told DNN about the purchase: “We’re excited about the acquisition of DomainName.com and plan to launch a premium registrar geared towards domainers and business. It will operate as separate brand from Namecheap. With all the features: dns, whois privacy, webhosting, SSL at extremely competitive pricing.”

According to information provided by the company NameCheap now has 1,5 million names under management for their clients. DomainManager provides free DNS for over 53,000 domains according to Zone File records.

(c) 2010 DomainNameNews.com

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When I was in graduate school earning a degree in Direct Marketing, my thought about an ideal first job was to work for Lester Wunderman, the person considered the father of direct marketing (he didn’t go by “Direct Marketing King” although he could have). As it worked out, when I graduated in 2004, I was hired as a Project Manager (and then later promoted to New Business Associate) at Wunderman, the company founded by Lester Wunderman and a part of Y&R Brands.

I was going through some old emails yesterday and I found the email I sent to colleagues announcing that I was leaving the company to start a new position at AIG. I thought I would share it here because I think it’s somewhat humorous.

Hi Everyone,

As many of you know, today is my last day at Wunderman.  My life-long dream of becoming a professional basketball player has finally come true.  After years of practice, I have officially been signed by the New York Knickerbockers of the MBA – not the National Basketball Association, but the MBA – (Midget Basketball Association).  For those of you who are unaware, we play Tuesdays and Thursdays at Madison Square – the Park, not the Garden.  I know that the life of a professional athlete is one filled with money, alcohol and groupies, but I certainly will not forget all of you.

All kidding aside, I wanted to take a moment to tell you all how much I have enjoyed working with you.  I have learned so much from all of you, and am lucky to have had the opportunity to work with you….

Working at Wunderman was a great experience for me, and it allowed me to work on the agency side of the advertising business, which was helpful in my next job. Some days I actually miss working for a fun company like Wunderman, but the advantages of self-employment certainly are great!

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The following 103 domain names are expired and available to register at the time of writing this. As usual, all names are linked to the Godaddy buy screen for quick Read more » No related posts.

Sedo reported their sales for last week. Highlights include the already reported angels.com sale at 200,000 USD, progress.nl as the top ccTLDs sale at 20,000 EUR (appx. $25,250 USD), and hostel.info leading the other category at 7,900 EUR (appx. $9,950 USD).

See all of the reported sales after the jump.

(c) 2010 DomainNameNews.com

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