(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- A New Jersey man, who was the first to be criminally arrested for domain name theft in the US, has been indicted on charges he stole a domain name, which he then sold on eBay for $111,000.
According to court reports, Criminal Justice Director Deborah L. Gramiccioni, the Division of Criminal Justice Major Crimes/Computer Analysis & Technology Unit, obtained a seven-count state grand jury indictment that charges 25-year-old Daniel Goncalves, of Union Township with theft by unlawful taking, theft by deception, computer theft, and identity theft, all in the second degree, and three counts of fourth-degree falsifying records.
"In the big money marketplace of the Internet, a popular domain name is like prime commercial real estate," said Attorney General Milgram. "The indictment charges that this defendant hacked into an online account of P2P.com, LLC, stole their domain name, and sold it to an unsuspecting customer on eBay for approximately $111,000."
Goncalves was arrested in July by the New Jersey State Police Cyber Crimes Unit after an investigation into the theft of the P2P.com domain name. In searching his premises, state troopers seized a large volume of business and computer records relevant to the domain name theft.
P2P.com, LLC, was formed expressly for the purchase and management of one domain name, P2P.com. Because of its short length and topical relation to the exploding Peer to Peer file sharing phenomenon, the domain name P2P.com was particularly valuable. The New Jersey State Police Cyber Crimes Unit initiated an investigation in October 2008 when representatives of P2P.com, LLC contacted them and asserted that their domain name had been stolen from their GoDaddy account in May 2006.
P2P.com, LLC began investigating the matter privately in May 2007, when an individual in the domaining community observed irregularities in the P2P.com site content and advised the company. A check of the P2P.com, LLC corporate GoDaddy domain account revealed that the domain name had been transferred without their knowledge or consent almost a year earlier.
It is charged that in May 2006, Goncalves illegally accessed P2P.com's GoDaddy account, and initiated a transfer of the domain name to his personal GoDaddy account. Records obtained from GoDaddy verified that the same IP address used to log into the P2P.com, LLC account and initiate the transfer was used to log into Goncalves’ own GoDaddy account and receive the transferred domain, completing the theft. He then allegedly sold it to former basketball player Mark Madsen, who was unaware that the Internet address was stolen.
 |
PREVIOUS: SSL Bug Could Have Been Exploited to Hack Twitter, says IBM | | | NEXT: Intermedia Offers Exchange Data Protection Guarantee |  |
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
Comment anonymously or log into your WHIR account
Logging in allows enhanced commenting features (such as external linking) in news, features, blogs and more.