I wrote an article about invalid Whois information on domain names that were transferred to Go Daddy from Moniker, and a representative from GoDaddy followed up to say that the issue was resolved. I experienced something very similar on transfers to Enom, and I hope the company addresses them, especially because these were sales and not simply registrar changes.
Last week, I sold a domain name that I owned in my account at Fabulous and another from my account at Network Solutions. The buyer of these two domain names requested a transfer to Enom, and both domain names made it to Enom (the buyer confirmed the first transfer via email, and I received a Network Solutions transfer confirmation email on the second transfer).
Both domain names now show up as being registered at Enom, but my company’s information is listed as the registrant, despite the transfer.
There are a variety of reasons why I think this is a problem, irrespective of the registrar:
- My deal was finalized using Escrow.com, and if the buyer doesn’t confirm the transfers, it might be more difficult for Escrow.com to see that I actually transferred the domain names.
- I would assume it could make it easier for me to take back the domain name(s) by calling Enom since the Whois information reflects all of my information. Since the names are in the buyer’s account, that may preclude me from this, but I would think it makes social engineering easier.
- I don’t really want to have my name on the Whois information of names I sold. I don’t want people to email me offers for a name I no longer own, nor do I want to receive inquiries about buying similar names from people using Whois information to send emails.
This issue seems like it could be a widespread problem, and I hope it’s addressed. It doesn’t make sense that a transferred domain name would reflect the former owner’s details rather than the account details of the new owner.
A registrar transfer is not the same as an ownership transfer, especially when dealing with a “thin” registry such as Verisign’s COM/NET that does not hold the contact information for the registrant at the registrar level.
Most registrars will ask you for the whois information to use when the transfer completes at the time of the initiation of the domain transfer, but some of them will attempt to copy the current whois information from the losing registrar’s whois (which doesn’t always work).
@ad: A push is another variety for an account change. I know some registrars ask when you initiate the push if you want to change the information on the account, not sure hoe eNom handles it.
One big difference between the two is that a push is initiated by the domain owner, while a transfer is initiated by a buyer. On a push, the domain owner can select whether to retain the current WHOIS information or take on the WHOIS information of the buyer. With a transfer, it should automatically take on the information of the buyer, in my opinion.
@Elliot: Not every registrar transfer has the purpose of facilitating an ownership change at the same time, so in a perfect world scenario the change of whois information should be optional too. There are many registries (i.e. in ccTLDs) that actually differentiate between the two transactions.