Hello, everyone and a

Posted By: anya07 ()
Posted On: 2007-Apr-14 00:09

I am an artist with a technical problem: We had a working art website for several years, looked nice, I've built that one from scratch. Then the registrar / hosting co. was sold, we changed the systems too, etc., the site was lost. I've menaged to re-register the name (or, so I thought, and paid too, btw.) with Dot5.com and built another, quick one on their template, not relly good enough, but, it worked, then, all of a sudden the site appeared as a collection of odd art etc. related links, nothing to do with us, someone took over our registered name? The IP: 86.220.61.156 - I got this from their NotePad on Source, not ours, the nameservers are locked to some name-services.com, - yet another links collection. Is there any way of getting our name back? How is it possible to find who locked out nameservers, I circled around for a couple of months now without any useful answer. It's our company's name, we have greetings cards, prints, etc., with this one on, you can imagine...
On Whois, there is some agent mentioned, but his email does not reply. I have not tried their snail-mail yet, it goes like c/o rolland-fine-art.com (our name, etc. in the US, but we are were in the UK and are now in France, - what is all this about? Is there any way of solving this ever? Has anyone here ever lost control over a registered name?


Posted By: Curt ()
Posted On: 2007-Apr-14 19:36

Wow, you should contact ICANN to see what they say about it. You might end up needing to contact a lawyer who specializes in internet issues. It seems as though someone hijacked your domain. You could also contact verisign (I believe they are the master registrar of all domain names--someone correct me if I'm wrong). Verisign might help you with it if you explain what happened well enough. Otherwise, you would need to take the lawyer route to get it back. Sorry to say that it might not be easy to get your domain back.

There's been crap like this going on in recent years and it seems to be happening more often as time progresses.

A note to everyone: BE SURE TO LOCK DOWN YOUR DOMAIN NAMES.

If you don't, you might lose them to unscrupulous individuals/companies who “steal” your domains from you.