Legal News

Having your domain name stolen is like getting punched in the gut. You try to log on to do some work on your site, or update some product information, but nothing works. You can’t get in, and you can’t switch things back. Or you check your email to find a notice that your domain name has been successfully switched to the new registrar, but you didn’t initiate any switch. You might feel lost, confused, miserable, and just plain angry.

Fortunately, there are some things you can do to get your domain name back. First, change all your passwords. While changing passwords may seem a lot like closing the barn door after the horse already got out, you don’t want whoever hacked into your account and transferred your domain away to have any more access to anything belonging to you.

It won’t fix your problem, but it can help keep the hacker from getting to anything else in your email account, or transferring any more domains (if you have others) away from you.

Next, contact your registrar. You want to make sure they know about the problem as soon as possible. They may have a policy for those kinds of problems, or a procedure you can start on that will allow you to move toward getting your domain name back. They may also be less than helpful.

Either way, it’s important to make the effort to let them know what’s going on, as proof that you acted quickly and attempted to resolve the problem. Some registrars will be willing to file a complaint against the registrar to which the stolen domain was transferred, but that’s not the case with all of them.

If you don’t get a quick resolution from working with your registrar, there are more significant steps you can take. Although the UDRP process is not normally considered one of the steps you can take, recently an UDRP was filed and achieved the return of the domain name.

The case CIN –