"stealing" domain names by Israeli registrar

[Dotan Cohen]

2009/4/17 Boaz Rymland <boaz at rymland.com>:
> 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... .
>

Network Solutions is known to do this as well:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/08/1920215

Actually, it is not uncommon:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/28/1458247

-- 
Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com
http://gibberish.co.il