New Jersey man hawks stolen domain on eBay, nets basketball player

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August 4th, 2009 - Posted by Kent

P2P.com is a website that started out in 1997, before the term P2P became known as peer-to-peer (a type of file sharing popularized by Napster). Back in 1997 it was the website of Port to Print, an online printing firm. Sometime around July 12th, 2005, the domain underwent a conversion. It was either bought from Port to Print, or the registration ran out—but someone with an eye towards the domain's potential value bought it. Suddenly, no longer the home of Port to Print, it became what's known in the business as either a placeholder domain or a domain squatter, a domain that just sits around waiting to be bought. Only, it seems, it wasn't bought. It was stolen.

Daniel Gonclaves allegedly hacked into the account of the domain holder and transfered ownership to himself. According to an AP report, that happened in May 2006. In September, LA Clippers star Mark Madsen bought it for $100,000 on eBay; that's about when the site got another makeover. On December 16th of the same year, the site assumed its current look (you can see the site here, but be warned that it will spawn a pop-up window if you try to back out of it or go to another site). To recap, it went from print business, to domain squatter, to hacker, to NBA star in ten years. Not only did the site go through four owners, the site's name went through two definitions in its lifetime. It also went from a legitimate business to a spam site designed to net unaware web surfers in a fake web directory and send them off on monetized links (this seems to have been done under Madsen's ownership).

And yes, you can add domain names to the list of dicey purchases you can make at the online auction house eBay. In fact, it may be one of the dicier things you can buy. After all, domains are entirely virtual products. Right now eBay is stocked full of Michael-Jackson-related domains.

Reportedly, this is the first time anyone's been arrested for stealing a domain (though the actual charges are: "theft by unlawful taking or deception, identity theft, and computer theft"). The big lessons here are: always make sure to renew your domain every year (or set it up for auto-renewal), and don't buy domains off of eBay. Understandably, Madsen probably thought p2p.com was a pretty good buy, even though he paid over $100k and never did much with it, except put spam there (bringing us to a third lesson: NBA stars, even in a terrible team like the LA Clippers, make way too much money).

You can register and host brand spanking new domains at any one of the web hosts we reviewed, and not worry about buying stolen property.