There are a lot of automated system crawling the web and collecting this data every day. Anyone that has ever owned a domain name with visible Whois information could be a future victim like some of the previous owners of the domain name that I mentioned above. They were also listed on the site, tied to a domain that they let go even though they didn’t own the domain name anymore. If you owned the domain mentioned/protected above http://www.PetFoodStoreMarket.com you name would have been listed with the reported scam with the new owners name regardless of the truth.

Why are so many companies collection this data in the volumes they are doing? Mailing lists are big business and with email filtering, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more people using the old snail mail method down the road.

This thing is much bigger than simply saying I have privacy on my domain names or I don’t own domain names anymore. If you have ever owned a domain name without privacy my guess is that your name, telephone number, address is in a database owned by someone with malicious means.

This is a big issue that is being ignored but I guarantee you it will make the news in a negative way in the near future.

As I mentioned in the above case my client ended up paying off the site owner and I’m guessing hundreds of other owners did the same that were targeted on the site. How many of them reported that they payed off this person? Probably none since most of the owners were scrambling to handle the damage that was being done.

One thing however is that I did notice that there were several owners of businesses that were threating to sue the individual regardless of his worth and I’m sure someone eventually did in the end just because of the number of companies being blackmailed.

After seeing the site go down 6 months later my only conclusion is that the owner was sued but regardless of the fact, it didn’t take long for many companies and domain owners to have their domain, online venture and lives destroyed.

What really got me is that I realized that it doesn’t necessarily have to happen to an established business website. It could really happen to anyone with a domain name even if there isn’t a site. The more domain names you have the more lottery tickets you have to be shafted. In my opinion, for a domain owner, a crime is more likely to happen in this fashion than identity theft.

Don’t mean to be negative or paranoid just telling you what I’ve seen and saying that there must be a better way to share whois information which I’m sure will come around one day. I am an owner of many domain names and don’t feel this flaw benefits the industry.

There is domain abuse… Sure :) But if you compare it to all the other businesses online or even offline — it really is 99% risk free if you think about it real good.

Not good being so paranoid… All the best,

Mike

http://www.wannadevelop.com/

Like the day I had thousands of letters sent through my mail slot only to see that they were all by the same company for each of my domain names.

It was spam by a registrar trying to get me to change each one of my domain names. It was obviously an automated process in which they took the whois information in large quanities and mailed a automatically mailed a letter for each domain name. The program they created obviously didn’t recognize the fact that many people such as myself own more than one domain name.

Using my whois information and using the mail system rather than email. How could anyone agree with this? A tree had to be chopped down to notify me that my domain names were about to expire. I already knew that and register them annually.

A mail man probably had to make a few special trips to my place. I wonder what he was thinking about the whole thing?

If somone is going to squat on a domain name they don’t have to put their real information there. A user could put the name George Bush until someone complains and then change it to his real name for a few days and then change it back to another name until someone complains again.

This begs the question. Wouldn’t a person squatting a domain be more likely to pay for privacy than a person that is using a domain name for a legitimate reason? So the person using the domain name for a legitimate reason is still vulnerable while the squatter is protected. The system is flawed.

Registrars shouldn’t be allowed to hoard domain names but they could easily be doing it under several different names like some companies have been accused of doing.

A solution to this might involve a registry that says how many domain names are owned by a particular people, not what domain names they own with telephone number address etc.

Really isn’t this equivalent to real estate or other ownership of items. If every piece of property had to display a sign with all of the personal information of the owner that would have advantages also. I walk by a Lamborghini in a parking lot and see the whois information that must be displayed in the window.

Who owns that explensive vehicle? Where does he live? What can I sell him? What does he do for a living? Write down his info and Google his name?

How is that different?

Here is just one example of what I am talking about and it is based on a client I had that payed me tens of thousands of dollars to handle damage control. I’ll change the details of this particular incident to protect the individuals.

Say you own the domain name PetFoodStoreMarket.com and decide to do thousands of dollars worth of advertising. Say someone has a beef with your company and buys the domain name ScamCompanyReportDocument.com posting lies about your company showing the WhoIs information along with a bunch of other companies.

Anyone that does a Google search using:

The PetFoodStoreMarket.com domain name
The PetFoodStoreMarket.com owner
The PetFoodStoreMarket.com owners home address
The PetFoodStoreMarket.com owners telephone number
etc.

will see instantly a Google SERP pop up, usually at the top of the list, with the title ScamCompanyReport.com. When they read it it will say that your company should not be trusted since many pets were poisoned and the owner is being investigated by police.

What can the owner do about this? He has invested money in building and advertising his company like most web projects do. If they contact the owner of ScamCompanyReportDocument.com, the owner will tell you that he can’t remove the information and that everything he is saying is true. Your really cornered into paying him off financially to remove the information since the damage it is doing is ruining your life day by day.

If you apply for a job most companies will do a Google search, if you go on a date most people will do a Google search, if you call a friend and they don’t recognize the telephone number often the friend will do a search. The domain you bought is useless, no one will buy from the store if they do any research.

If you contact a lawyer the first thing he will do is tell you it will take at least $10,000 to start to go after the individual and there is no guarantee that the individual will have any money that can be returned if you sue him.

What happens to most companies that fall in this trap? They end up closing down the website and what additional damage does this do? When the remaining client base (customers that hasn’t seen or realized the fake news) types the domain into their browser and finds a dead page, they then think they made a mistake in the domain name. This once again leads to a Google search for PetFoodStoreMarket.com which brings up the ScamCompanyReport.com page.

The ScamCompanyReport.com page gets the additional attention and hits pushing it higher in the search engines causing more damage to companies that are listed on the site. These guys that run these sites are the worst scum on the internet and it really is unknown how much money they extort from the people they victimize.

CIRA .ca domain names has already made some steps in the right direction to automatically protect whois information when a domain name is bought. Paying for privacy on domain names is a cash grab from registrars. There are many people who spend a lot of time looking up the WhoIs information of good domain names and report false information in the hopes that they can grab the domain when it gets pulled from the owner. Many people are just trying to protect their information without being ripped off paying for privacy. Besides privacy isn’t really privacy, the guy that had the Scam site above looked up the historical whois which had all of the previous owners and changes to the whois data.

With domain names selling for thousands even millions of dollars how long will it be before we start to see murders happening because of the whois information? If a domain is in a will or a competitor wants control of domain or to bring down a company?

What do you guys think about this topic?

Thanks for the updates and links.

check this out:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/35218