Domain flippers are the World Wide Web’s equivalent of big capital real estate flippers. They’re artificially inflating the price of domains. Can you imagine how much he domain name owners of every mobile casinos brought us paid to acquire that specific domain name, if someone else had registered it first?
They are causing a huge problem for the Internet by taking valuable names off the auction block and selling them to other resellers for inflated prices.
The guys at Internet Brands say they’ve been trying to fix the problem for the past decade, but now they’ve run into an unexpected problem.
They’ve been forced to dip into the company’s wallet to help victims recover.
I once owned a domain with a very catchy, brand-able name and one day some guy from New Jersey claimed that he owned it. He showed me documents saying he was the owner of the domain, but I knew he was lying. We agreed to sell it for $25,000 to give him a taste of his own medicine.
I called my lawyer right away and we got the guy to sign a release. We sent him the money and returned the domain.
About a year later I got a letter from New Jersey. It said he was suing us for $25,000 for repossessing the domain.
I called my lawyer again and we got the letter sent back to New Jersey for the court to decide. If they had sued we would have sued them back, but instead we resolved the matter with a $15,000 donation to the nonprofit Legal Aid Society in New Jersey.
It’s rare that you can resolve a dispute over a domain name with zero harm to your company, but we did it.
It turned out that the guy never owned the domain, it was a hoax. The guy was trying to extort money from us.
It seems this type of activity is on the rise. Domain flippers are the online equivalent of big capital real estate flippers. They are artificially inflating the price of domains.
The story is making the rounds on the web and I decided to share it on the PopularDomain website.
The latest scheme to steal domains and leave people out to dry is more sophisticated than the typical domain buyer or seller con.
Domain flippers are out to steal domains and leave people high and dry. Usually they do it through bogus domain auctions, so they can set a very high winning bid so they can make a lot of money. But sometimes they go straight for domain names that people are trying to sell on the auction site.
They will bid on a domain that people are trying to sell and then announce that they’ve won the domain. That’s when the domain holders need to come up with the money.
It’s always the same thing. They will get the domain name and they won’t pay the money they owe. They will then go after the domain holders.
Domain buyers and sellers should be very suspicious of the person selling a domain name that they are trying to buy.
