48 Hours in Domain Theft Hell

“Your hands are shaking,” said the woman who kindly helped me scan documents that would enable me to reclaim the Simple English News domain from an unscrupulous individual (or individuals) in Turkey who had stolen it two days earlier.

I had been filling out the papers that GoDaddy’s “Undo” Department requires in cases in which domains are in dispute. And yes, I was nervous – or rather unnerved.

On Sunday, everything was as normal as a Sunday could be. I had gone out for long walk by the river, finished a hearty dinner and had just fixed myself a cup of green tea to warm me up on a cool fall evening. Before vegetating in front of the television, I wanted to do a routine check the day’s statistics of the site and see that it was running.

Lo and behold, instead the ordinary content I would expect to see, there was a generic GoDaddy page one sees immediately after a site is registered.

There must be some mistake, I said to myself.

Thus, I went to www.who.is to confirm that the site was still registered to me.

It wasn’t.

Someone who left nothing other than a first name and an address — which read only “Turkey” — had managed to access the domain.

I immediately logged in to my account at GoDaddy. Yes, I was able to log in to my account. All of my other sites, nine in total, were there. Only Simple English News was missing.

My next step was to call GoDaddy. The person I spoke with in the customer service department was friendly, but acted as if it was the first time something like this had ever happened at the world’s largest domain name registrar. (Far from it, I was to discover later. This sort of thing happens with surprising and almost frightening frequency.)

She asked me if anyone else had access to the account.

“No,” I said.

Next she told me to change my password, pin number and email which were associated with the account, and to send a letter to the department at GoDaddy which is responsible for “undoing” domains.

Unlike its customer service which is open 24/7, GoDaddy’s Undo Department does not come in the office until Monday morning. The attack on the account happened on a Sunday. Not only would I lose whatever modest revenue the site earns, but all the emails sent my way would be either lost in a cyber vacuum or redirected to the culprit who had stolen my site, my copyright and, in some respects, my identity.

The letter to GoDaddy was promptly drafted and sent. An automatic response came back informing me that I would have to wait another 24 hours at least before I would get any response.

In the meantime, I went through the mother of all panic attacks. What if I don’t get the site on which dedicated hours, days, years of my time back? It was like being robbed in the real world, only in this case there was no physical trace of the criminal – which made it feel, dare I say, more alarming.

The panic was exacerbated upon performing a quick search on Google which found that numerous other people had had their sites stealthily removed from their GoDaddy accounts with similar alacrity. All the attacks occurred on a Sunday when the bandits knew the GoDaddy office responsible for returning domains to their rightful owners would be closed.

I was in daze all Monday. A few frantic conversations were held with my business partner, with acquaintances of mine who are technical mavens and again with GoDaddy’s customer service (which once more made it seem as if the problem were somehow on my side.) The feeling was one of hopelessness. Nobody had a clue as to what to do except wait.

Finally a response came in on Monday evening which required that various forms be filled out and scanned photo of my passport. Given the hour the email was received and lack of a scanner in my apartment, I could only return the information to GoDaddy the following day.

I awoke to a bright cool early autumn morning with the sense that Simple English News would be back in my possession shortly. Still, there was a lingering doubt that all might not go well – brought on by forum posts in which commenters claimed it took them weeks of back-and-forth emails with GoDaddy before they regained possession of their domains.

On Tuesday afternoon the forms were filled – shaky hands and all – and sent GoDaddy’s way. Four hours later, a email confirmed that I was in fact the rightful owner of the domain and that I could henceforth reclaim it. Name servers were switched and an hour later, near midnight on Tuesday evening, things were back to “normal”.

Yet there is still no telling how much damage was done, how many readers the site may have lost, how many important emails I may have missed.

Further, there was no apology from GoDaddy for whom this is not – since they are the longest domain registrar and hence the biggest target for such attacks – an infrequent occurrence. Instead the final missive from the Undo Department advised that I buy extra security features from GoDaddy.

Heretofore I had been recommending GoDaddy to everyone I know who is interested in having a presence on the Internet. Now I wonder if the company is deliberately lax on security issues so that customers will be forced to make additional purchases to prevent their domains from being hijacked again.

What’s more, there is no word that the person(s) who perpetrated this theft have been reported to authorities or even (at the very least) been banned from GoDaddy.

After this all-too-harrowing encounter with these lowlifes of the cyber world, I need some fresh air. Perhaps a long walk by the river will do the trick.