Domain Hijacked?
What is domain hijacking?
My client’s domain name was hijacked unavailable to him. He had contracted with a service provider that was supplying him with email services and security and making the payments to his domain service provider on his behalf. What he didn’t know was that if he wanted to end the contract with the service provider, transfer his domain, and make a new website he would have to show he was the owner of it.
This was the first incident of domain hijacking I have encountered where this was set up like this. I was recently told by a friend this would be OK if it was set up as such in the contract.
How to recover.
One of the first things I did was to open up a new account with another hosting company for his website. Everything went well until I was asked for the transfer code for his domain name. Well, I could not get that because all the email to verify his account was going to the service provider’s email and not my client. I was stumped. So what I did was to go to Whois.com to verify he was indeed the owner of this domain name. In fact, he has been the owner since 2005.
So i got online again and went to the domain provider that distributed his name and asked what could be done. They directed me to a link on their site that takes you to a page that describes how a user would recover his account. The procedure was simple and effective. My client had to provide two US government-issued identification cards and a credit card for proof. Once this was mailed to the office (some offer electronic mail proofing) and verified we were back in business.
The process took about a week from start to finish and the customer was very happy in the end.
What did we learn?
I would suggest in the future to read all the print in a contract you sign even if it’s from a friend and do not sign your domain over to any business for any reason. And read what you can on this disturbing trend.