I have been trying to track down the owner of a domain name that was registered to DNStination Inc. I’ve seen that company in a number of Whois lookups, and I am pretty sure a number of large companies use them for domain registration and likely other services. I am quite certain they don’t actually own the domain name, but they are the registrant.
I’ve shared a number of ways to find domain owners in the past, and I want to share another method I used to find the owner of this domain name.
The domain name was sort of developed, although it wasn’t extensive enough to consider a business. I used Screenshots.com to see that this particular website hadn’t changed much in the last couple of years, so it’s possible that the project is no longer a priority for the owner.
As I previously recommended, I had a look at the privacy policy and terms and conditions pages, and the email addresses were @domainname, which didn’t help me because it hadn’t worked in the past. In the privacy page, it listed the name of the company that operated the website. I was then able to search Google for the LLC name, and I found a site that had quite a bit of legal information about the LLC, including the company’s registered agent.
I recognized the registered agent’s name and have his contact information on file already (he’s an attorney and owns the domain name). This person isn’t involved in the domain industry, but I know of a few names he has sold in the past, and this will be helpful when contacting him directly.
I have no idea if I’ll be able to strike a deal, but it is always nice to be able to contact a domain owner directly instead of stopping when the trail goes cold. From my experience, going the extra mile is the difference between acquiring an awesome domain name and skipping over it like others have in the past.
Some TLDs do not allow privacy protection (I believe .us is one of them), so sometimes finding domain name in such TLD owned by same person/organization is a way to get contact information…
I’d like to hear this story through, Elliot. Will you keep us posted?
Good stuff, Elliot. Thanks for sharing, as always. And people think Sherlock Holmes is dead…