A rather alarming thread over at DNForum unravels the plight of a buyer from Turkey, who paid a four-figure sum for a LLLL .com domain.
At least, that’s what he thought he was getting.
The seller, apparently posting from a hijacked member account, claimed that he was offering for sale the domain name MOIL.com.
Notice the capitalization; in lower case, the domain would be moil.com
The buyer sent payment via PayPal, only to receive the domain name RNOIL.com – or, rnoil.com in lower case.
Clearly a scam, as the RNOIL.com domain was registered yesterday and the “r” and “n” letters together are made to look like an “m”.
And that’s why I don’t buy domains on weekends, at least not from people I have not transacted with in the past: one cannot call the phone number in the WHOIS and verify if indeed the domain is for sale.
MOIL.com belongs to a Texan company and the URL brings up a password-protected area.
Read the full drama here.
Hi,
A similar case happened to me in DNForum.com a pair of years ago and it’s one of the main reasons that pushed me to create my escrow service.
Domainers (and I am one of them) are often too much impatient, not always appreciate online money value and/or give too much trust to people they don’t really know. It’s a fact!
Who will say in the real world entering in a supermarket to an unknown person:
Please keep me my bag (where there is your wallet with few hundred dollars of cash) a moment the time I go out get a caddie?
NOBODY!!!
So imagine if your wallet has more than a thousand dollars.
In my case for sure after pay $1K to $2K (not remember now the exact amount) I immediately opened a dispute with PayPal.
I also had the chance to know the CEO where the purchased domain was registered (NameCheap.com) who accepted to testify in my favor at PayPal (but was not motivated to act himself blocking the domain). As you may imagine, Paypal who consider domains as virtual goods and never refund for these purchases give reason to the scammer, so I lost my money. Because PayPal decisions are not immediates, the scammer had the time to move the name to ENOM. But here also the CEO was reluctant to act despite I bring him all the evidences of fraud. So I never get the domain and I lost my money, I also lost the good relationship I had with NameCheap and ENOM CEO because I was so upset they did not blocked the scammer when it was possible for them.
The conclusion, is always use an escrow service: Escrow.com,ECOP.com, … even if they are small transactions and even if you estimate the other party is a mate.
At ECOP.com sale transactions under $500 are FREE and we are considering raise it up to $1,000 in September.
So you have no excuse!!!
Cheers.
That’s disappointing Francois- was he using a fake paypal name as well? Something similar happened to me recently, I sold a site and got a false chargeback filed against me for “unauthorized charge” so I lost the site and the money.
Paypal said they would try to dispute the chargeback but nothing happened for months so I figured it was over.. then right out of the blue the other day, the chargeback got reversed and I got the money back, so it looks like Paypal came through. I will still use Paypal for transactions under $500 but anything over and I’ll be looking at an escrow service.
The bottom line is, there is no protection by PayPal when domains are involved; they are “intangible items”.
Also, no escrow protects anyone from stolen domains, so do your research before you buy.