Fraud Within The Industry.
Those within the domain industry will be aware of the increasing fraud and domain thefts taking place in recent times.
Fraud and theft have of course always been a problem within the industry but it seems in recent times the matter has multiplied.
In the past few months several forums have found their user base have been fooled by phishing scams (Namepros, DNF etc etc). This is not a problem with the forums themselves but more to do with the education of their users. As usual with anything the weak point is the users.
The phishing scam was a particular problem as it gave scammers credibility and they were able to buy and sell with ease as people thought they were dealing with reputable long standing members.
Another problem that is related as such is the stealing and selling on of domain names. Sometimes this is an easy thing to check. As can be seen from some recent cases you can contact the person who is listed in the whois (provided they do not use whois privacy, see not using whois privacy can be a good thing) to see if they are in fact selling the domain name. Of course if the domain has been stolen and the person who stole it managed to change the whois details this will not help.
This is where another technique can help. Sites such as Domain Tools offer a whois history search which can be extremely handy. If you check the whois history and it has recently changed hands it *may* be a sign that something has happened and may need closer inspection.
SO WHAT CAN BE DONE
Unfortunately at the moment scammers and thieves have got the upper hand. Their is no formal cooperation between the different venues for buying and selling domain names. Each has their own way of dealing with things and each keep a fair bit of information to themselves.
So how can this be stopped? Well like many crimes it will never be stopped 100% however we can try to make the crime harder for them to accomplish. The industry needs to have a shake up and for forums of business to cooperate with each other more. A recent incident on DNF could have been avoided if a proactive approach of cooperation had been sought. This is not a fault of DNF nor Namepros, the matter could quite as easily been the other way around.
Each site has made efforts in the past to help ensure the safety of their members but it was in essence an internal thing. As the efforts were internal to a particular forum it was met with suspicion from the other forum so not embraced.
The only thing I believe that can be done is to have a completely independent site that most (if not all) forums and places of domain business where reports of banned members are stored (of course only banned members who were banned for fraudulent activity rather something like swearing etc). The site would need complete cooperation from the domain forums to ensure that records were kept upto date (maybe for example have 1 staff member who sits on a board and is responsible for such cooperation). The site could also be used for example to keep track of domains that have *known* to have been stolen.
If such cooperation had been sought in the past and had actually taken place it could quite easily have stopped many fraudulent transactions from taking place.
What do you think?
Do you agree with this?
Do you think it could work?
Tags: domain industry, fraud, theft