Comment by mystcb
6 years ago
I am sure, in the past, one of the domain registrars took the liberty of actually registering your searched domain, deliberately, so that you had to go through them to get the domain later on? - I can't remember who it was, but it was an automated process.
I know it was very shortly stopped once people complained, but it goes to show that it has been done before.
Getting rich off domain's - sounds like a solid business plan!
I've got no evidence except anecdptes, but I've heard claims that GoDaddy used to do this a lot. For this reason I've only searched a domain I was going to immediately buy, otherwise I'll do a whois lookup to see if it's registered.
Just looked about and found these:
"Does GoDaddy register domains you search?" (2011) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running
I remember something about registrars doing this so the domain you wanted wouldn't get snatched by someone else while you were in the process of buying it. Made more sense back in the time when far more basic names were available and such collisions were probably common for high-value domain names. Now it's two people finding the same needle in a haystack.
I knew a guy named pachell that did this from 1997-2001 until registrars changed the rule. pachell wherever you are, i miss you