At what point is a domain name yours? When you have won the auction and its in your account at the registrar? Think again.
On Feb 2, 2008 I won a Snapnames auction with a final price of US$173. The domain has more than made its money back, yesterday it made US$1.50.
When I won the name at Snapnames, the registration provider was ItsYourDomain.com. The domain expires in December 2008 - so I thought it was about time that I transferred it out to another provider.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying to get the name transferred. The domain is in my account, I have the auth code, transfer shield was disabled - everything is ready to go.
The only problem was that it appeared that SecureWhois appeared to be on and therefore my new registrar couldn’t send emails to the admin and technical contacts. Here is what it looked like:
Registrant
Pending Renewal or Deletion
SecureWhois, Inc.
pending-renewal@onlineaccess.net
96 Mowat
Toronto, ON M6K 3M1 CA
+1.4165385428
+1.4163520113 (FAX)
After a number of failed requests to disable SecureWhois, I received this email from their Technical Support staff:
“It looks like the domain had expired long time ago and was deleted from our system, it is now in pending delete status at the Registrar level. If you are interested we can check the price to get the domain back from the registrar.”
I was thinking… wait a minute…. something isn’t right here… I won this thing in Feb! So after writing back to their support dept asking them to “get the domain back immediately” - I decided to give them a call…. and by some miracle, they answered their support number!
It turns out that I never received the domain in the first place! Although the name appeared in my registrar account and I could make changes to it, the domain was “marked in the system” as being a backorder, and not actually “allocated” to me. After feeling somewhat in the twilight zone, I was told that they would immediately put a request through to allocate it to me and that I should see the change in the whois record. Sure enough, the change went through. That domain in my account that I’ve been making $$ from is now… well… mine.
What’s the lesson learned from all of this? Just because you see a domain in your account at your registrar, doesn’t mean its yours! Check the whois record.
P.S. Yes, this is a separate issue from yesterday. I don’t know whether its the “law of attraction” here, but everything seems to be happening at once!
