Citybankonline.com Guilty Of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking

CITY BANK (not CitiBank) whose site is CityBankOnline.com and CityBankTexas.com, represented by Kristi Dent of Cox Smith Matthews Incorporated, Texas, USA was just found guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking (RDNH). The domain in question was CityBank.com.

The three member panel UDRP panel of Fernando Triana, Esq, James A. Carmodym, and Dennis A. Foster, Esq said on the issue of RDNH:

“”In the present case, the disputed domain name was registered in 1995, with a business model based on pay-per-click advertisement. Complainant registered its domain names in 1998 and 1999, which means that at least on those dates Complainant should have known that the disputed domain name was not available and neglected to proceed against it, until 2014, which is 15 years after Complainant should have known of the existence of a conflict.

Furthermore, Complainant did not provide any evidence as to prove its trademark rights regarding the expression CITY BANK and tried to confuse the Panel regarding Respondent’s bad faith, as the Complaint asserted that Respondent offered to sell the disputed domain name for over USD $180,000, when from the exchanged emails it is obvious that Respondent was not offering the disputed domain name but responding to an offer from Complainant, and simply informed Complainant that a third party had offered to pay for the disputed domain name USD $180,000, and that in fact Respondent refrained itself from selling it.

Finally, Complainant’s long delay in bringing this action is another factor supporting a finding of its bad faith.

The fact that Complainant filed this proceeding nearly 15 years after Complainant should have known of the existence of the disputed domain name and over 18 years after the disputed domain name registration, suggests that Complainant knew it had a very weak claim and nevertheless filed its UDRP Complaint in bad faith.””