A couple days ago we wrote about Little.com being stolen, Namepros member The Legendary JP appears to have solved the case. The domain was stolen but it was stolen from the original owner.
Ok did a little digging….
I actually tired to buy this name YEARS ago from the long time owner John Little.
John continued to own the name until March 5th at least, then whois changed within Netsol to a Korean KR owner and not 7, yes SEVEN days later sold to our OP.
Red flags everywhere there but I think it is safe to say the name was stolen from John, resold in 7 days to our OP using escrow.com and Netsol has frozen and taken it back for John.
Case closed, OP learned a lesson now go to bed.
Its now on the OP to hunt the thief down and try to recover funds, escrow cannot help, John Little and Netsol cannot help. At best Netsol could give the OP an IP or something of the thief but still useless really.
OP, bad luck!
That’s a hard lesson to learn. I would have personally advise doing a 30 day inspection on the escrow exchange at minimum. It’s probably going to be a near to impossible to find the person that did this. My direct sympathies to the victim of this digital crime .
What precautions should the buyer in the middle have taken – either to identify the domain as stolen prior to purchasing or else to recover his funds after the domain was confiscated?
Bueller?
The entire domain ownership system is flawed. A titled – as in the case of selling cars or real estate property in the US – must be established. No domain property would change hands without authorization AND a change of the title. Recent advancements in peer authorization e.g. via blockchain could be utilized in this system. ICANN needs to spend some of its $300+ million dollars to implement this asap!
Any chance that the original owner, JL, manufactured a man in the middle?
I think everybody needs to be modfying the entity. Its 2016 for gods sake.
Just a little update, it seems the OP claims now he bought it from John, that to me is even funnier since proving that is true. I suggest the readers go through the whole thread as things took twists and turns as we went along and thought of other plausible cases.
At the end of the day I have no doubt John had the name stolen, it was either resold or the OP stole it. Used escrow to try and cover his tracks with himself or rip off the OP…I also noticed Johns email was a free email, that may have been how the thief gain access.
All I know is the OP is either HUGELY unlucky in thinking he was buying from the original owner or is trying to trick us.
I Second you
@acro
Correct. Blockchain technology could solve problems like this.
Don’t rely only on technology, always do your own accurate due diligence before buying (and selling, renting, etc) a domain. 🙂