Domain theft is not something that you can report to the police like a car theft and it is hard to even police on the web because it happens way too often. Crimes like Domain theft can hit you at home but all over the world and what is worse is that sometimes you don’t even realize that the domain has been stolen for quite some time. 99.9 percent of the time, the new owner of the domain has no idea that they were buying a stolen domain name. They will come to realize why they got some domains at a very cheap price.

This happened about 15 years ago, it was a case called Raven.com, there was a man named Don Teske, he lived in Minnesota and he started a company called Raven Computer Systems and in 1992 he bought and registered a generic domain called Raven.com. It was many years that had gone by and the company ran smooth and in 2005, Don Teske passed away. The wife of Don Teske had her own email account and she did check it regularly and then one day she saw it was not working, they had an IT tech come in and take a look but what he found was that she did not have control over the domain anymore. The domain was going to expire in 2008 so she thought it expired or she forgot to pay the bill. But after some checking it domain did belong to her and the renewal was not up for another year.

The registrar, Network Solution saw that the Whois changed and someone had changed Don Teske’s email address. What happened was whoever stole it convinced someone at Network Solutions to change the Whois information. The thief was a name named Kushaiah now owned the domain and then transferred the domain from Network Solutions to another registrar before they could figure out what was happening.

The domain appeared in DirectNic about a week later, there was a fake address on the account . The domain went for sale on Sedo. The winner of the domain registered the name on GoDaddy and used their proxy service to hid their whois information. The name should have been worth a lot of money but it was sold for very little and that is how it managed to get flagged. The three registrars are working on an investigation and currently there is no resolve.

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