Participating in domain name auctions at DropCatch is a business activity that I partake in weekly, enhancing and expanding my domain portfolio.
DropCatch auctions are popular among other domain investors and I do attend the auction at its closing moments. This approach offers two benefits: deciding whether I want to win “must-have” domains and to make payment after the auction so that I take quick control of the domain name at NameBright, the sister company of DropCatch.
At NameBright, it’s easy to set up the default nameservers, in order to point them to domain marketplaces such as the Uniregistry Market or Dan.com.
Although NameBright offers free WHOIS privacy for the first year, setting that up requires an extra step. NameBright groups domains in categories, one of which is called “DropCatch” and it’s not the default category. You can change that, as the default category should be the most used group in your account.
In all the years I used DropCatch to win domains in auctions or drop-catching I didn’t fail to set up the WHOIS privacy soon after; the default option was set to “Off.”
Except this past week, while on a fun vacation in Greece whereupon I didn’t do almost anything domain-related on a computer, other than to respond to domain sale inquiries. I won a DropCatch auction and the payment was made automatically but WHOIS information for that domain remained unprotected.
Within two days of that auction, I started receiving calls and emails as my contact information was exposed to WHOIS scrapers that scan lists of recently registered domains and spam their registrants.
To fix that issue at NameBright, I had to log into my account, click on the Categories tab and select the DropCatch category. Once there, I clicked on Settings and scrolled down to the Privacy Protection section where I set it to “On.” Going forward, there’s nothing else I need to do in order to maintain WHOIS privacy after I win domains at DropCatch and spammers will be hitting the NameBright filters.
If NameBright offered free WHOIS privacy for subsequent years I’d probably use them as a no-frills yet effective domain registrant. For now, I continue to transfer my DropCatch-won domains out about 60 days later to Sav.com.
Many thanks to Jamie of dotWeekly for providing me with valuable tips to navigate the maze of NameBright settings; I hope he begins blogging again soon! 😀
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