About a week ago, my sister received the following email:

Domain Sale Notice:

<your-domain-name>.com is coming available for sale in a few days.

Since you own the domain <your-domain-name>.net, we thought you’d be interested in <your-domain-name>.com

If you do have interest in acquiring <your-domain-name>.com, please fill up priority notice form availble [sic] at our website and we will contact you as soon as the domain is available for purchase.

We look forward to hearing back from you.

So my sister emails me asking if this is for real. “Unfortunately, it is” was my response. She has the less desirable .net name because the .com had been taken by a competitor many years before. The competitor went bankrupt a year or so ago.

What a crock. So if I’m to understand this correctly, these dirtbags are going to try to swipe this domain name then resell it to my sister at an absurdly inflated price. Long story short, I’d already registered with a domain monitoring service and ended up getting the name for her myself.

But I was curious. So I visited their site. Their homepage greeted me with:

…In our humble opinion, we are the only place on the Net to go for instant delivery of great domains at a great price with great customer service behind it… We won’t bore you with a lot of words here, instead, take a look at what our customers have to say about us!

I’m looking through these “testimonials” asking myself how people can be this stupid. Then again, these are probably the same people who were paying scalpers a thousand bucks a seat for Hannah Montana tickets. Are these people crooks? Usually not. If they bought the domain name before anybody had a corresponding registered trademark, it’s a legitimate speculation I suppose. Still, I consider it a highly questionable practice.

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