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Private registrations may cost owners their domains
February 23rd, 2007 by 
Jay Westerdal
As we reported earlier, RegisterFly is in chaos right now. We are are hearing reports that private registration in the whois, which consumers thought protected them, may do the opposite. Private registrations shields the identity of who owns the domain, which means the only company that can help you if something goes wrong is your registrar. What happens if your registrar doesn’t answer emails and will not process your renewals? This is a very real situation for hundreds of thousands of people. Customers are frustrated because they can’t prove they own their domains, and they may loose them permanently.
If a customer has a public registration or normal record, they can fax their driver’s license to another registrar and prove ownership. Once the domain leaves the old registrar where information was guarded, it would be hard to prove to a third party what happened. With a historic record of who owns what domain and when, it is easy to fight domain theft.
Further news today from ICANN – they have found RegisterFly to be in breech of its accreditation. RegisterFly has 15 days to cure the breech or ICANN will pull the plug. The signs don’t look good for the company, but this may help the customers if it is done quickly. We reported earlier that some customers had expressed suicidal thoughts out of frustrations with the company.
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Posted in ICANN, Private Registration, RegisterFly |
11 Comments »
February 23rd, 2007 at 8:08 am
I’ve been advocating against the use of domain privacy services for reasons just like this for one’s most valuable domains, even though others think otherwise. See the thread at:
http://www.circleid.com/posts/1512/
which discusses the issue. In theory, one could invoke the ICANN “Transfer Dispute Resolution Procedure”, i.e.
http://www.icann.org/transfers/dispute-policy-12jul04.htm
if one can demonstrate ownership of the domain name to the gaining registrar, and the losing registrar has been uncooperative. Registrants who can’t prove they own the domain name are out of luck.
February 23rd, 2007 at 12:33 pm
The old adage is nearly (99.9% of the time…except for in Walmart perhaps:)) always true: “you get what you pay for.”
February 23rd, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Can you point me to some documentation on the fax process for transfering a domain? I use private registrations, so your post makes me think I should not.
February 24th, 2007 at 5:24 am
I was in a similar situation, so i know the feeling, but what u can do is back order your own domains, that way you will still own them the second they are “free”.
ps. Always register your domains where u have FULL control of them incase you want to tranfer.
February 24th, 2007 at 9:24 am
Big advise to all, move away from R’fly, keep bug them if your domain info need to be upgrade or taken out of private registrations, yesterday I finally got all my domains out of R’Fly and even got back an Adult domain that was for a long time in redemption while I thought I owned it and had renewed it with R’Fly.
Kevin Medina is a big thief and should be held responsible for most of what happend to us, I do believe that not only R’Fly is the bad apple in all of this.
I’m very happy to see how this is spreading the net as we as domain onwers need to warn others for such dangers on the net.
February 24th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
i dont understand what is the Backorder “Set a backorder so you can own” , i can lose any domain becouse that services make that , i can not have posibility to continued payment or what ?
that services is not good for anywane … that i think.
February 24th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
Back order explained:
lets say someone owns a domain name and you want it, now lets say that same domain name will expire in 5 days.
If the person who owns the name does not renew it, the second the domain name expires the company that you made the backorder with will grab it for you.
There are lots of companies that will backorder domains for you, I did it once and it worked for me.
In your case you already own the domain name, but R’fly is messing around and wont renew it. Ok no problem
Just do a backorder.
Its like going to the market and going inside the back to get the good stuff, not whats on the shelfs.