Domain Names & Identity Theft

Are all of the domain names registered in your name.. yours?

Up until last week, I thought so too!

I’m getting ready to move, so I was doing a little local real estate research online.   I typed my own address into the search bar to see if I could find other locally listed property values.   Instead, I found a couple of domain names that were registered using my information.

I often come across indexed whois pages for some of my domain names, but I usually recognize them right away.  I knew something was fishy when my first and last name, address, phone number and former business name appeared in the whois of a domain name that I never registered.

Right after I found the first domain name, I looked for others and found one more… I started to become frantic, but I kept it together and sent an email to the registrar where the domain names were registered.  Just a few minutes later I received a call from the registrar.   Of course, I was upset that I had become a victim of identity theft, so I’m glad Scott at Name.com was patient with me as I did a little flipping out.  I especially flipped out when I found out this individual registered 113 domain names using my info!!!!

I was assured that Name.com was taking the issue very seriously, and in fact, they did.  Within a few days, the domain names were taken out of my name,  out of the account, and the account holder blacklisted.

Don’t get me wrong, I am happy that this identity thief lost their domain names… but I feel like maybe something more should be done.  As far as I’m concerned a crime has taken place.  I was really worried for a few days that this person might attempt to do business as me.  It scares me how easy it was for someone to use all of my information… and that I found out about it by accident.

I don’t know if there’s a way to prevent something like this from happening… but I’d recommend anyone with a portfolio of domain names do some general research to be sure all of the domain names registered in your name are, in fact, yours.

If you have a DomainTools.com account, once you verify your email address you can pull a free report.  The one I pulled had a lot of domain names that I no longer owned on there, and not all of the ones I did.  I did, however, find another domain name that I didn’t register using my info as the admin and technical.

Give yourself a checkup… and if you have any tips to share, please don’t hesitate.