I recall reading a story about a small business owner who didn't re-register their domain name, and when the time was up another company registered the name, and then offered to sell it back to the small business owner at an extraordinarily high price. Can this really happen? I'm not sure if it's true, because I read it on the internet.

It's absolutely a true case scenerio.

Allow me to give a real life scenerio that our company faced....

We had been purposely leaking info about a product that we were working on, to build hype.

As usual, it was taking some time to develop properly, and as such we kept the hype moving forward.

Out of nowhere, one of our own customers asked about how we were planning to market the new software, and if it would have it's own site like another product of our's has, etc.

When we said "yeah, and the domain will be....."

Within about an hour, this customer registered the name (we were in no hurry at the time...dumb mistake).

In all of about 2 hours, this customer emailed us asking if we wanted to buy it off of them. Openly stating that he thought it would be of use to us so he registered it for us, and would "give" it to us for $500!!!!!

When we showed no interest, he lowered it to $50, and then down to "I'll just take whatever you offer for it."

The entire time that we were showing no interest, we sent an email to the registrar, and ICANN reporting it (it's illegal to do what they did. It's called Cyber Squatting).

Within about 4 hours, we were contacted by both the registrar and ICANN asking where we would like the domain name transferred to. They then pulled rank and simply moved it to the registrar of our choice (our own of course) at no cost.

So yeah, while I can't testify to the story you read being true, the situation is extremely true, and common.

The only case that I heard of it involved a rather larger company whose name involved the century that we were in. They didn't think about the fact that, at the turn of the century they would need a new domain until someone else had owned it for a good long time-too long for it to be comsidered cyber squating, and it did indeed involve a big pay out.

Usually when a domain name is abt to expire you will get lot of reminding emails and notifications and so you better take action to extend the registration period or simply register it for a longer duration i.e 5-10 years and so you can avoid situation such as someone else stealing your domain name

Yikes, ANMMark! That is just the sort of thing I read about! I think I will definitely warn others about this now that I am sure it is valid. Nice to know there is something you can do about it!

And haha to the fellow who tried to shaft you out of $500... I hope he got a cyber spanking!

Well I was trying to have this done, but was told from ICANN that I would need to administer it myself. After I threw up in my mouth a little, I just decided I'd drop it.

Yeah it doesn't sound worth it, once you got the issue resolved. It might have been different if you hadn't been able to get the domain, but since it was resolved for you I don't think I would have gone any further either.

However I think I likely would have released that client.

The client absolutely had their software license suspended.