July 19th, 2007 by ketyung
I think quite a number of you also had this bad experience. A domain name that you’ve been eyeing for quite some time, but was stolen a few days after you’d done a WHOIS lookup for its availability. This happened to us, a colleague of mine wanted to register a domain name for a customer. At first she did a check on any of the WHOIS such as the registerfly, cheap-domainnames.com yesterday. What she got was the domain name was available for registration. But she didn’t register the domain name immediately as we needed to get back to the customer to tell them the availability, so we could then get the confirmation and proceed for registration. Unfortunately, when we got the green light and tried to register today, we failed to register it as it’s claimed to have been taken. And I quickly did several WHOIS checks, but couple of them giving me the result only about the domain name has been registered but failed to provide its registrant. Lastly, I managed to get the result from NETWORKSOLUTIONS, which showed that it was just registered yesterday, which I think was a couple of hours after her checking.
While googling around what could have happened to that domain name, I also found couple of guys also had this bad experience before on Josh’s SEO blog. It tells that the domain name has been stolen. And they seemed to have answers that the company behind for this stealing act is UltraRPM.com aka MetaPredict. Yes, the WHOIS result that I got showed the registrant of the stolen domain name is MetaPredict. It seems to be MetaPredict is the kind of company which possibly makes use of SpyWare to infect Internet Explorer or possibly Firefox too (My colleague used Firefox to check the domain name instead of IE), to steal unregistered domain names that you have done WHOIS lookup check or even typed on the address bar of Internet Explorer.
I haven’t got much clue why UltraRPM.com is stealing those unregistered domain names. Guesses are they probably wanna test the domain name whether it’s potential for high traffic and monetizable. And will hold the domain name for 5 days only, as there is a 5 days of grace period to go for a refund if they returned it, after they’ve found that the domain name doesn’t carry much value. Or they’re simply con man, selling newly registered domain information or email accounts to others. Anyway, to avoid this happens to you, always make sure your PC is free from SpyWare by always having an up-to-date virus and spyware scanning pattern. Perhaps, those free plug-ins for your browser also not safe to have. It could be some of them are hijacking your privacy or keystroke and send the information back to their server. Or another alternative, forget about your Windows PC, and use Linux and Firefox only. I wish the stolen domain name could be returned after 5 days. Anyway, it isn’t a domain name related to any big brand that could possibly bring in high traffic.
domain name,spyware,domain registration,MetaPredict,UltraRPM.com,stealing domain name,anti-spyware,Internet Explorer,Firefox
Technorati Tags: domain name, spyware, domain registration, MetaPredict, UltraRPM.com, stealing domain name, anti-spyware, Internet Explorer, Firefox
Stumble it!
July 20th, 2007 at 1:42 am
Looks like they will stop at nothing to gain cash. Doing scanning now.
July 20th, 2007 at 2:34 am
haha .. do it asap
July 20th, 2007 at 8:08 am
did this today to my client. its not only them I see 2 or them different companies same tactics. just wait for 5 days when its deleted hopefuly youll get your domain name. just never ever contact them or visit the domain name.
I hope ICANN limits the deletion grace period or restricts these people from doing these as these are everyday obvious tactics that can be dealt with by ICANN
July 22nd, 2007 at 9:37 am
we’ll just wait.anyway, luckily, it’s isnt a must-have for the customer, we can twist a little bit of the name
August 14th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
Bob Parsons, CEO of GoDaddy, has written an excellent blog entry about how stolen domain names are montetized. It was written over a year ago. This scheme is nothing new, but the ways scam artists are collecting the names could be changing.
Bob Parsons’ Blog: The Add/Drop Scheme:
http://www.bobparsons.com/adddropscheme.html
December 23rd, 2007 at 7:08 pm
they are scum. i have just lost a domain that i needed. i had paid for it to be registered 24 hours previously and i checked whois to see if it was registered and it was not. then i type in domain name 2 hours later and a site is up.
show what happens when you use crap/slow domain registrars.
January 10th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
[...] couple of months ago, I wrote about a domain name that we were eyeing on was gone a few hours later after doing lookup for it, and then found it was [...]
January 16th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
I noticed that one of the names I wanted to register was taken by metapredict. However, it seems to have been taken for a couple of weeks now. I’m guessing more people have mistyped our website and metapredict thought it would be a good money maker for them. WHOIS shows the registration expiring in about 7 months, I wonder if they’ll renew.
January 16th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
If the domain name is somehow close any famous phrase and many people would tend to mistype it. And it seems to see some traffic with it, maybe metapredict would think that it’s worth to keep and renew. As you said it’s good money maker
. But hope they’ll release for you soon 
January 22nd, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Make em lose a lil money then. Just whois as much as possible. Use dictionary. Then keep on coming back and check the domains
January 23rd, 2008 at 8:09 am
They don’t pay to register (’taste’) domains, so trying to get them overloaded with bullshit domains won’t work. It’ll likely motivate them to expand their business.
Here’s what you do if they steal your domain:
* Never visit it, never tell anyone about it, remove all references to it. You want to make the domain inactive, which makes it unattractive to them.
* NEVER contact them. If they see that you want the domain, they’ll charge you a lot for it, obviously. That’s how their business works.
* Wait 5 FULL days before trying to register it again. Unless it’s getting enough hits to keep it, they will release it after the ‘taste’ test expires (exactly 5 days).
* They release 99% of domain names due to inactivity.. the 1% of people that contact them, or the few domains they get that make lots of money off clicks, keep them in business.