DnTrade.com.au and a few others have been buzzing about Bitcoin.com.au being auctioned off on Netfleet.
Cazalla at Qntra.net wrote the best explanation of what happened, this was the second time Bitcoin.com.au sold this year.
Apparently it is a popular tactic to report domains with bad info in Australia, the author explains, “Australian domainers employ in order to secure premium domains is to look for ones which contain outdated or expired registrant details before lodging a complaint with auDA.”
From the article:
Bitcoin.com.au has been inadvertently sold at auction via the Australian domain name drop catcher Netfleet at a price of AUD $36,300 or the equivalent of around USD $31,200. This marks the second time bitcoin.com.au has been sold in 2014, having been previously purchased at a price of USD $23,000 by Zhenya Tsvetnenko of Digital CC, the Australian company which trades as Digital BTC.
According to the Digital BTC annual report1 for year ending June 30th 2014, Zhenya purchased the domain name in order to secure it for Digital CC. The report states:
Digital CC IP Pty Ltd purchased the bitcoin.com.au domain name from Magna Fortis Pty Ltd (a company controlled by Zhenya Tsvetnenko) for US$23,000. The purchase amount was the cost to acquire the domain name by Magna Fortis Pty Ltd from a third party unrelated vendor.
It appears that Zhenya Tsvetnenko failed to update the WHOIS information upon completion of the sale. His name, while listed as the technical contact for the domain, was not added as the current registrant, with the previous owners details listed instead.
auDA, the organisation that administers the .com.au ccTLD have a strict eligibility criteria as to who can and cannot purchase a .com.au domain name. This makes it difficult for non-Australians or companies which don’t operate in Australia to register a .com.au domain name. The criteria one must meet includes a current ABN2 or ACN3 and in this case, the previous owners ABN expired sometime in 2013. Yours truly can confirm that this is the case as I checked out the domain in early 2013, realised the ABN had expired and then spoke with the owner, warning him he risked losing the domain should he fail to renew his ABN. Since that time, the domain has been sold but the details remained unchanged, until today’s auction.
Read the full story on Qntra.net
And that’s why some of us non-Australians have stayed out of the .COM.AU market. If all it takes is a complaint to dispossess a registrant of a domain, then paying for premium domains as an outsider seems much too risky. Who would trust registrar trustee services enough to be willing to lose an investment worth tens of thousands of dollars?