I was the owner of an internet porn site in Bulgaria

A friend told me recently that he found his preferred internet domain name for a blog already registered by somebody hoping to sell it. That reminded me of my own experience with domain squatters back in the heydays of dotcom activity...

I was working as a management consultant and my client was a professional services firm. We had worked hard to launch a secure extranet service for their clients. The domain name for the service was rather long (20+ characters) but it had a natural abbreviation that we used when discussing the service internally. Prior to launch we had tried to make the service available using the abbreviated domain name but had found ourselves unable to register it. The domain was already being used by a county in the United States.

It wasn't long after the launch of the service that clients started complaining. Somehow, the short version of the domain name must have been mentioned to clients in passing, or they tried it out on their own because it seemed like a logical name. When clients typed the shorthand domain into their browsers they arrived at a porn site. Shortly after our launch, the US county had let the domain name lapse and it was now pointing at a porn site.

I remember the meeting with the project steering group at which the problem was discussed. As I was the only one who openly admitted that I had verified the clients' claim (and visited the porn site) I was tasked with investigating how we might secure control of the domain name. Sly comments and witticisms followed from the rest of the steering group.

My first action was to ask my client's internet team to block access to the domain. I figured the last thing I needed was a sudden surge in traffic from a single address, alerting the other side to the fact that somebody was interested in the domain. Next, I tried to find out who to approach.

I knew about the whois service but hadn't used it before. In this case it was very useful. I got details of the account owners (who turned out to be based in Bulgaria) and contacted them via a webmail account at the email address listed. Within 24 hours I received a response and a price. I contacted my client's CIO and said that I would try to negotiate the price but would the magnitude be acceptable? It was, and I entered into negotiations resulting in a 35% discount. As for payment, I insisted on escrow although I had no real experience with escrow payments.

Via Google, I found a service in California that claimed to process domain name escrow. My client had their lawyers take a look at the service and they gave it the green light. When it came to payment, my client insisted that I acted as a private individual and that they were not directly involved in the transaction: I could claim back the purchase price via expenses. I, in turn, decided to use my company credit card... just in case anything went wrong or got delayed.

Both parties entered into the escrow agreement: A defined process with set deadlines for each step. It all progressed smoothly until my webmail provider went bust before we finished the transaction. My email address was my identity with the escrow service and suddenly I found myself unable to receive the password I needed to verify the claim that the domain had been transferred. To get out of the situation required a copy of my passport and credit card to be faxed to the escrow service with details of a new email address for communication. With this extra hurdle to jump the transaction was closed. I had the domain and the Bulgarians got the money (minus the escrow fee).

At that point, my colleagues took great pleasure in joking about how I was the owner of an internet porn site. I was trying to find out how to fiddle with the registry settings so that the domain didn't point to the porn site server anymore and also to transfer the domain ownership to my client. Eventually, it succeeded of course, but that is how I was, for a short time, the not-so-proud owner of an internet porn site. Just another way to please the client.

Tags: internet domain names porn porn site consulting management consulting escrow

Comments

[Allan]

Great story!! :-D