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.