I received an email from Paypal this morning that may impact domain name deals that are transacted via Paypal. The company is now covering digital goods with Paypal Purchase Protection. The email did not specifically mention domain names, but it would surprise me if domain names were not covered based on the announcement that was made to customers this morning.

In my opinion, the most safe way to transact on a domain deal is to use an escrow service. This helps reduce quite a bit of the risk when doing a domain name deal. The escrow service verifies payment for the domain name and it verifies that the domain name was transferred to the buyer before releasing the funds. Essentially, an escrow service helps reduce risk.

I will reach out to Paypal to see if the sale of domain names is covered when this policy change becomes effective.

Here is the email I received this morning:

Subject:

Over the weekend, I noticed a Whois change on the valuable Skincare.com domain name. Current Whois records show that Skincare.com is now owned by L’Oreal USA Inc. L’Oreal is one of the leading cosmetics and skincare  companies in the world.  As of the time of publication, Skincare.com resolves to a parked page, but I presume L’Oreal has plans to use the domain name.

According to historical Whois records from as recently as this past Thursday, Skincare.com had previously been owned by Anything.com, a domain investment company that has a large portfolio of valuable domain names, including Home.com, Marketing.com, Quebec.com, and many others.

I reached out to representatives from Anything.com, and I learned that

Manmeet Singh of JUA.in is reporting that his company brokered the sale of 143.com for an undisclosed sum of money:

Just sold http://t.co/0drGfX1onQ to a non-chinese domain name investor. #DomainNames #GoodStart @dnoai @DInvesting

— Jua.in (@Jua_in) May 22, 2015

After receiving an email from Manmeet and seeing the tweet above and a post on Facebook, I reached out to see if he could share any information about the sale or insight about the domain name. Here’s what he had to say about the deal that has already reportedly closed: