"stealing" domain names by Israeli registrar

[Boaz Rymland]

Hi all,


Consultation needed:


A friend of mine and myself are volunteering to launch a charity web site.

My friend is not proficient in web technologies so when he went to check 
for registration of the domain, he followed the instructions recommended 
on one of the Israeli registrars - internic.co.il and check through 
their website the vacancy of the domain we wanted, with .co.il . It was 
as vacant as it can be.


The following day, he went to actually register the domain and guess 
what? The domain was already registered(!)... .

This smelled very fishy: the domain name was very unlikely to be 
requested "by coincidence" at that exact timing; the person holding the 
domain was some Israeli name with a very unreadable email address ending 
in some .info domain (cannot quote the email address here - see PS 
section below).

Now I have another friend who's deep into the hosting business and he 
immediately told me that the owners of Internic.co.il are know to be 
doing this very ugly move on whois queries running through their web site.


*My questions*:

* is that business method illegal?

* what can be done here in order to react? (be the internic method legal 
or not).


Thanks!

Boaz.


*P.S.*

* luckily for us, after I talked to my friend we made it clear that the 
needed domain should finish with a .org, not .co.il, so we actually 
weren't hit by Internic sting. The incident was and still is, very 
irritating.

* the .co.il domain was hijacked on March 24 (IIRC) but its now free - 
no registration records exists for it so I cannot quote the snatcher 
details. But, since Internic (or the people they're affiliated with) are 
making a living in the described method, it should be rather easy to 
prove how they work - its a little matter of persistence... .

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