Domain Registrars who Steal Domains from their Customers
The first serious blog post is on this topic because, believe it or not, it is a real concern. I get support tickets about this all the time, so I assume it affects a lot of people.
You can go to the web site of pretty much any domain registration service provider (including www.eVerity.com), and type in a domain name to see whether or not it is available. Some major registrars (I will not mention any by name) will show the domain as being available, but then immediately register it. To the customer who was interested in purchasing the domain name, it continues to be appear as available, but from everywhere else on the net it appears as already registered. In this way, these companies are forcing you to buy the domain name from them, often times at inflated prices. One popular registrar (again, I won’t mention it by name) will label these types of domain names as “Premium” and will charge 3 to 10 times the normal price because they know you really want it.
If you don’t purchase the domain from them at the price they are demanding, they may put it up for auction and sell it to the highest bidder, or if you are lucky, release it back to the general public within 5 days.
You can avoid this trap by being careful where you go to check for domain name availability. If you search through eVerity, for example, we will keep a list of every domain you look up: one column for those that are available, and one for those that are not. If you are logged in when you look up domains, we’ll store these lists for you as long as you want. Its pretty helpful, and best of all, we won’t register any domains unless you ask us to. This service is free, even if you are not a paying customer.
Comment from ZAREMA
Time March 20, 2010 at 8:48 am
Thanks the author for article. The main thing do not forget about users, and continue in the same spirit.