Security Bullet In
Communiques from the security front, sir
Monday 23 June 2008, 12:44 PM
Sites listed under false pretences
I found out that I was the proud owner of a website today. The trouble is, I have never heard of the site, and have absolutely nothing to do with it.
I found out that I am listed by WHOIS as being the administrator of a site called www.travel-getaways.com. The way that I found out is that I was contacted by the owner of another website, asking me to stop pulling content from his site and putting it on www.travel-getaways.com. He had done a WHOIS lookup and had found I was listed as the administrator, so contacted me to very politely ask me to stop nicking his content.
I did a WHOIS lookup, and found I was indeed listed as the administrator, and that the contact address was my work address. I found that the registrar was GoDaddy.com, so rang their support line.
"Could I have your customer number please sir?" said the courteous member of GoDaddy's support staff.
"Well, that's just the problem," I said. "I don't have one."
I was asked to write an email explaining the situation, so am waiting to hear back about the next stage.
I found out that I am listed by WHOIS as being the administrator of a site called www.travel-getaways.com. The way that I found out is that I was contacted by the owner of another website, asking me to stop pulling content from his site and putting it on www.travel-getaways.com. He had done a WHOIS lookup and had found I was listed as the administrator, so contacted me to very politely ask me to stop nicking his content.
I did a WHOIS lookup, and found I was indeed listed as the administrator, and that the contact address was my work address. I found that the registrar was GoDaddy.com, so rang their support line.
"Could I have your customer number please sir?" said the courteous member of GoDaddy's support staff.
"Well, that's just the problem," I said. "I don't have one."
I was asked to write an email explaining the situation, so am waiting to hear back about the next stage.
PreviousComments on this post
If you were less ethically minded than you are, I wonder if you could use your "ownership" to somehow move the site to another host then sell the domain name... there'd be some money in that, I imagine...
