Recently i came across a report where a leading domain registrar had confiscated a premium domain just because the domain owner failed to reply to their emails. Yes, its a true incident and is still being worked out in court of law.

What happened was that someone had lodged a complaint that the premium domain had false whoIS records. Domain registrar sent an email which wasn't responded to for nearly two months and then suddenly domain was confiscated and in matter of days, it had a new owner. it was discovered that new owner had infact backordered the domain before lodging a complaint.

Pretty senseless it sounds, but domain registrar never made effort to telephone or send a post card. Just because emails they sent never got them replies, they presumed it to be a false email and thus whois. Singing the tune of ICANN rules, they confiscated the domain.

I personally feel incidents like this should not be ignored or allowed to be a repeat. Domain registrar could have done more than what they did (send an email) and at same time ICANN needs to really address the whois concerns of its domain holders. Why should some one pay nearly half the price of domain to protect their details being leaked out to public? Well thats a separate issue altogether, but what we are discussing here is was it a case of false whois or a trick used by domain hijacker. If it goes like the way it did, then any one could test genuineness of whois, and if they find no response from email address listed in whois, just backorder domain and complain about it.

What needs to be addressed here is that domain owner may be in hospital virtually helpless and not in position to use net. They may be moving house and thus have no net connection. Spamguards or spam filters would filter it out. There could be so many other things.

Was domain registrar justified in the action they took or did they fall into trap laid by the domain hijacker?

How do you see this situation be solved now? Should new owner be depived of the domain and it be returned to previous owner? Should domain registrar be penalized?

Was it not go-daddy that did this to a customer recently?

Yes, you are right. But then i didn't want any one to be mentioned, just have views on this.

Correct, part of the Terms you *AGREE* to when purchasing the rights to use a domian is that you will provide correct and accurate details for eth whois database - you provide cr@p or false information, then yes, you broke the terms and deserve to lose the domain.

Because domain "ownership" is public information, just like property ownership, or compnay ownership. In my opinion, "whois protection" is a scam and almost exclusively used by scammers.