DomainTools Blog

The biggest goal an ecommerce site has is to earn the trust and confidence of the consumer. Before making a purchase or signing up for a program at a new company, I am in the habit of doing my due diligence to investigate the company. I check how many years they have been in business using the WHOIS record. Then I Google for them using the keywords of mistrust such as [insert company name] “COMPANY scam” and “COMPANY warning”. If people describe really bad situations, then I stay clear.

This evening I checked out Auction Ads – I had heard about the company in a blog post. But while doing my background checking it appears they block access to see who the company is runs by. They are using Domains by Proxy from GoDaddy to block their WHOIS information from appearing in the public. I have to ask, “what are they trying to hide”? Last time I saw this it turned out to be an ecommerce site run by some scammers out of India. I looked at the WHOIS history and it says a person named James Hagans was the last registered owner of the website and he lived at “75 Blenheim Rd, Columbus, OH, 43214″.

Check the WHOIS before doing any sort of ecommerce transaction. You never know what you are going to find. I never enter my credit card information on any website I find which hides who they are. They want my credit card information but they will not tell me who they are… I think not.

Here is the WHOIS for Auction Ads.com, I am glad to report there is some talk in sub-committees at ICANN for making it a requirement to show WHOIS information on ecommerce sites. I have heard ShoeMoney owns the site, but he commented that “Its actually a joint venture between my parent company and Media Wiz (owner of text link ads, review me, etc..)“. Honestly it is hard to say what the real truth is because it is hidden.

I think one day I will make a list of ecommerce websites that hide their identity. Any other websites out there that look legitimate from the HTML side but they look shady on the WHOIS side?

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.

A friend of mine told me about the Flying Karamazov Brothers performance at the Seattle Symphony Hall. I thought it sounded fun so I decided to book some tickets. The first thing I did was attempt to visit their domain and look for a preview of the upcoming performance I wanted to see. I start every search on DomainTools for R&D purposes and not Google, so I tend to find things most people don’t. The first thing I tried was Psychic Whois, it predicts what the remaining part of the domain is, so I thought, boy, how many “flying” domains can there be, this will be easy. Wrong. There are so over 7,000 Flying domains and hundreds of flying animals. 181 Flying Fish and 154 Flying Pig domains. So I tried our Domain Suggestion search engine, I entered “Flying Karamazov” and bam! I was surprised to see the FlyingKaramazov.com as available. I know our readership and at least one person out there will snipe the name so I registered it for them for safe keeping, (the Karamazov brothers will find this post later and they are free to have their domains at no cost. BTW, I enjoyed the show). I found it extremely interesting that I was going to a public performance and the domain name for the performers were not even registered. The Karamazov.com domain was registered however by someone trying to monetize it. The most disturbing thing was something that looked like Domains by Proxy but in fact was just the registrant pretending to be a proxy service. Clever, but highly questionable, there should be a rule against this.

Registrant [6999]:
    Whois Data Shield
    4300 South US Highwy 1
    Suite 203-168
    Jupiter
    FL
    33477
    US 

Administrative Contact [6999]:
    Domain Administration  
    Whois Data Shield
    4300 South US Highwy 1
    Suite 203-168
    Jupiter
    FL
    33477
    US
    Phone: +1.15614270129

Next step to finding the Flying Karamazov Brothers was going to Google. I entered their name into the search box and I found them, they own their acronym of fkb.com. I suggest companies register all variations on their name before they establish themselves under that name or a $10 mistake will cost thousands in legal fees later.