Tips for Avoiding Domain Name Theft

Domain thefts are on the rise, and the people blindly helping these blatant thefts may surprise you. Domain registrars and ICANN for the most part!

Recently, a hacker broke into my namescheap.com user account, and transferred two of my oldest domains away from namecheap.com and to (according to most of the posts on the Internet) a known hacker / thief domain registrar called estdomains.com.

When I discovered this criminal’s email address in my account, I emailed namecheap.com’s fraud department, and soon discovered the domains had been transferred out to estdomains.com.

Since I had paid for two years in these domains, and the two years weren’t up yet, I was pretty confident namecheap.com would reverse the transfer and get my domains back.

Wrong….

I was told that namecheap.com had to get something called a Standardized Form of Authorization (FOA) from the gaining registrar (estdomains.com) and that would clear things up, but this would just makes things worse. Three weeks later, namecheap.com told me that the transfer was done according to ICANN rules and policies and that the public whois matched the thief’s at the time of the transfer!

How did this happen? The thief broke into my domain account at namecheap.com (they, of course, denied this was possible), then changed my email address for each domain to his, and changed all the contact info (the information shown in a public whois) to his own, and saved everything. Anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour later, the whois info now shows the hacker’s email and contact info, and he now can transfer the domain anywhere he wants to!

You may think that since I still owned the domains, and that for nearly two years my whois information was listed, and the thief hadn’t even bothered to change the domain name-servers from my VPS host, that namecheap.com would see that and realize the domain was stolen and that I hadn’t transferred the domains.

Wrong again…

I soon discovered that namecheap.com only cares if the public whois information matches the person transferring the domain at the time of the transfer, and that the person transferring said domain does it according to namecheap.com’s weak “Yes or No” system for transferring domains.

Since the hacker had changed the whois to his information just prior to requesting a transfer and followed the rules for transferring a domain, the domain was his as far as namecheap.com (and everyone else in the domain registrar business) was concerned.

In other words, as long as the domain registrars have covered themselves with “the domain was transferred as per policy”, then that domain you paid 10 years for and still have 9 left is no longer yours! They will NOT investigate, and no matter how obvious the theft, or how many receipts you have proving ownership, they will do nothing.

What are the options if you lose a domain? ICANN.org will let you pay for an arbitration committee. The Price? For a one person arbitration it’s $1,500.00. If you hire an attorney, and go to court, you can probably guess it’s gonna be a whole lot more.

Sounds pretty bleak for domain owners huh? It IS bleak since the domain registrars have made sure they have no obligation to their customers to protect the customer’s domains purchased through each registrar.

How can you lessen the chances of losing your domain?

1. Register the domain for at least five years.

2. Do not under any circumstance use a free email account for your domain registrar account, or your domain contact information. Everything you enter into the domain registration info is available to the public if you don’t use a private whois subscription service. Criminals look for domains using free email accounts such as hotmail and yahoo that they can break into.

3. Use the lock option for each domain. Keep in mind tho, that if a hacker break into your email account or domain registrar account, he can easily remove the lock in order to transfer the domain(s).

4. Use a strong password for all your email and other accounts (not the same one!) … Mix up the password and don’t use dictionary words .

5. Login and check your domain accounts frequently. This means to check all the domains whois information and your listed domain email.

After this experience, I think as domain name owners, we really need to band together and put pressure on the domain registrars and ICANN.org to help protect our investments rather than allow the registrars and ICANN.org to help the criminals (that are simply using the registrar’s and ICANN’s policy loopholes) to steal anyone’s domain.

Jan Michaels is the creator of the Article Friendly Article Publishing Script for php & mysql, and can be found at Article Friendly and Mr Reviewer.

Submitted By ArticleUnited.com

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